I’m not an ass kisser. Never will be. If you’re expecting a page full of sucking up, I can save you some time.

This post isn’t about singing Lisa Barone’s professional praises – some things are self evident. But it is about one of the best posts I’ve ever read of hers.

I insist that you go read her Open Letter.

You need a reason? Here’s a quote:

There was an eye-opening article on Inc. Magazine yesterday from Drew Gannon where she (yes, she) writes about the uphill battle women face in tech.

Drew’s piece touches on the Women in Technology Panel (catch it on YouTube) that took place last week where Important Women came together to discuss the power of women and the challenges we still face.

What are some of these challenges?

We’re meek.

We don’t share ideas in meetings.

We routinely discount ourselves.

We’re bad at math, science and other things that require high-level brain thinkings.

We’re responsible for twice as much of the housework than men and three times the childcare.

Dude! I had no idea! I always thought these were personality traits certain people had – like a bad temper or an affinity for collecting life-sized dolls.

Now, I know that some of these conferences that seek to address issues women have mean well, and they do help people.

But as Lisa pointed out, there’s a huge difference between a PERSONALITY flaw, and a GENDER TRAIT. And even if something IS more common in women, the solution isn’t to tie it on like some feedbag of shame. It’s to conquer it like the warriors we are.

I don’t have a problem with people who have problems getting help to solve them. Actually, I’m a HUGE fan of that. But lookit. That picture they’re painting? Doesn’t match up to me.

Meek? Not only will I share an idea in a meeting, if I think I’m right and you give me shit, I will shove it up your nostril until you convince me that I’ve been heard.

Discount myself? Not routinely, (though some of my pricing needs to be fixed, right now. And my blog is called Free Traffic Tips for goodness sakes.  If it wasn’t for bragging rights to my search results, I’d have razed this site to the ground a long time ago.)

I kick math and science’s ASS. And yours too if you’re ever dumb enough to grab the second PS3 controller when I’m playing a fighting game.

Housework? You’ve got to be kidding me. They have services for that. Yes, I helped rear both my sister’s sets of twins – but that was in equal partnership with her parents and my mother.

My point is, I don’t fit in stereotypes or boxes.

Yes, there are issues I struggle with as a women and a black person in technology.

So? Everyone’s got problems. And the issues were not CAUSED by my womanosity or blackuality.

And that’s the lithmus test.

Anyone remember that ridiculous book The Bell Curve, that used erroneous science to “prove” that the injustices black people faced were caused by their genetics, rather than the result of circumstances? I actually sat and read the book for a college class, and if you know anything about the difference between a causation and a corollary, it’s amazing that it was ever taken seriously by any true scientist.

Making blanket statements about women, then using statistics or factoids to assert gender as the cause, rather than a group of facts that coincide, is just as dumb.

… or he’s a genius.

photo credit: Valerie Everett

I tried to stop myself from writing this because I want this whole week to be about me, my retirement, and of course me. But I can’t help it. So let me tell you what happened.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to Mark on the phone – and since he is my marketing idol, I spent the whole call hoping I didn’t sound like a complete nut job…

Because that’s really too soon for new friends to know you’ve flown around the cuckoo’s nest one too many times, you know?

And he said something about this big huge secret project that he was doing.

Then I barely heard from him until today. I thought I said something stupid that I couldn’t remember, or he got word of my mental instability (haha). But no. It’s that HE is the one who is off his rocker. He wasn’t saying much because he was all about this project.

So what did he do that I’m shaking my head at?

Just gave away his book free. That’s all. Been on the best seller list a bunch of times – not just Amazon’s. I think it was his last book that was on the Wall Street Journal’s best seller list.

And I bet he can do it again in a heart beat, without breaking a sweat. But, instead? He just gave it away. Just like that.

Let me tell you something? When my book comes out — and it is coming soon — I’ll sign your copy. I’ll throw in free shipping. Because I do love you.

But there ain’t NO way you’re getting a free copy. So don’t ask me. You want a free book? Go talk to Mr. Joyner.

And you tell him I said….

Uh…

Okay don’t tell Mr. Joyner I said anything. Let’s just keep this between us for now. I’m reading the book now – the subtitle is “How Small Businesses Become Big Businesses – and Big Businesses Become Empires“.

And I’m telling you, you want to read it.

Right now.

< rant >
Dear Safari Three,

I Detest You.

You and I had such a good thing going. It’s true, I didn’t ever like your illogical bookmarking arrangement, or the fact that you would suddenly crash for no reason, when nothing else was open.

But your interface was cleaner, and we could maintain a separate relationship on the side when I didn’t feel like opening up Firefox. I’m sure you know you would never take his place. You seemed… happy… during our torrid affair.

I don’t know if it’s a mid-life crisis or what. But I’m not liking your little Safari 3.0 beta party clothes at all.

I used to be able to use you to make blog posts that I couldn’t in Firefox, like videos, and manual aligning of pictures, because you shunned the Visual Editor. That was one of the things I liked about you. But when you changed, I accepted it.

At first.

Now, you screw up my posts when I edit. And you still aren’t compatible with StumbleUpon. So I lost some of the things I love most about you, and haven’t gained any advantages but the privilege of a slightly-better drop down option list.

I still love my MacBook Pro, and can’t even part with it for one night to get my Sims 2 DVD to eject. I’m still crazy about Apple, although I’m not buying an iPhone until/unless they add video.

But Safari? You and I need to seriously re-evaluate this relationship. Love-hate has turned to hate-hate, and apart from occasional angry-but-still-hot relations, we’re gonna hafta part ways. Opera and I are going to try our side fling again.

Firefox, if you’re reading this, know that I’m never going to leave you for any of these skanks. Nothing compares to you. When I’m with Internet Explorer, it’s only when I am on a business trip in an XP window. Safari, hell, even Opera means nothing to me.

They’re just quick diversions that I use like hoes so that I won’t taint you with my side activities, video fetishes and quick, personal work that has nothing to do with business or what we have together. I don’t want you remembering some of the windows I used to go to in Safari. If you play Real Player videos better, or zoom the way I like it, I would be willing to talk about not making Opera my side fling.

Safari, I gave it a shot when I had to upgrade or start using Firefox exclusively again. I tried. It’s just not working.

And it’s not me. It’s you.

< /rant >

… is the word Social in there for a Reason?

I was reading a post on Sphinn just now. Kind of ironic that I chose to write a blog post about it, as you’ll soon see. When the content of my comments go over three paragraphs, I tend to extend them into posts.

That way that site gets a premium link and traffic in addition to my brain power.

The title of the post is If You Show Me Yours I’ll Show You Mine – The Backrub Effect.

It makes a complaint I’m hearing more often, one which I find largely invalid but needs to be addressed because it deals with a key component to unlocking your social media traffic.

Here’s a quote – it’s very passionate blogging, which makes for a good read.

I feel disappointed …
I started using Digg a few months ago and I had several posts in the Programming section. Quality free stuff done so nicely that a few 100s of lines could be reused in just 3. As easy as it gets. I had great hopes as, compared to the rest of the content, mine was quality.

I received a few visits and that’s it. I said to myself I was posting in the wrong place as my stuff should have appealed to web developers and I do hope I’m not the only one.

I stopped using Digg.
Assuming this was my fault, I didn’t use Digg anymore and, with a bitter taste, I just did with it what it does best: get pages indexed fast!

And then there was light …
I started noticing many posts on blogs about Social Bookmarking and how to game with it. I was getting more and more digggusted and I finally understood the thing I could not figure out first. « No matter how good your content is, they don’t give a funk! »

I understood that quality is not an issue there and to get Dugg or Stumbled you need connections. These connections, improperly called friends, are supposed to make your site get popular if … if you make theirs! It’s the back rub thing. U2ME ME2U!

… and disappointment.

The writer is disillusioned, because he feels that votes on content in Digg or Sphinn are based on reciprocal favoring. I completely understand how he got that impression on Digg, where it’s harder (though not impossible) to get to the front page without established connections.

However, I believe the fallacy in his thinking is that he seems to believe hat

1. it only takes connections, and you can’t make the front page without them.
2. Friendship comes before quality content on social media sites
3. Quality doesn’t matter as much as friendship.
4. Particularly on Sphinn, you’re getting votes because people know/like you, not because they found your content useful, funny, informative, relevant, etc., if not enjoyable as well.

If that last one were true, I’d be on the front page of Digg every day. However, my content is not targeted to the typical Digg reader, which I think is probably the most important lesson most who covet Digg traffic should learn. That, and the fact that getting on the front page of Digg still requires a targeted post of some level of quality or at least interest.

Back to the point though – if getting on the front page of Digg was based on influence/connections alone, why aren’t all the well connected people always on the front page of Digg, exclusively? The socialsphere isn’t perfect, but it’s at least as fair as the blogosphere, or we’d never have new A-listeres. Nor would the current and past A-listers ever decline in relevance, traffic, influence or interest.

You wouldn’t even have to BE an A-lister to enjoy the traffic levels of the Technorati top 100 if that were true.

Think about it.

I have 10K email subscribers on my newsletter list. If it’s free and takes only a minute, most of them would do that for me, whether to curry favor with me or just because they like me.

At least 100 of the connections I’ve made in the last 5 years have lists over 100K, a few over a million. I could waste a favor on that one time at a site like Sphinn and the momentum would keep me permanently on the front page with each new story – if social bookmarking or social news sites worked like that.

If this logic is true, this very post should be on the front page of the technology section of Digg based on name recognition alone.

And I’m not even bragging when I say that… on some weekends you can get on the front page of the technology section with a few hundred well timed Diggs.

Sidebar: For the love of God please don’t Digg this story, or anything at my site, ever, or at least until I upgrade to a dedicated server. Thanks.

Now, I won’t say that an idea like that has NO merit. There are smart things you can do with your connections that can help you get the initial push you need to get noticed at social media sites.

However, in the real world, it just doesn’t work like that.

One simple reason is that no one has time to vote for all their friends blog posts each day. Another is that none of us has time to ask for that particular favor all the time. Imagine how much time it would take a person who does four blog posts a day to also send a private message to 100 friends asking them to Digg/Stumble/Sphinn/Plug/Bump/Stirr/Mark?

And even if you had time like that on your hands, not everyone would do it, every time. In fact, after a while, your daily request would fade into background noise.

I will grant the author the fact that Digg may be about the connections, but with Sphinn or StumbleUpon, that’s only enough to get the cart rolling – the gravity of your submission has to take you the rest of the way.

Sure, it’s great to have momentum and smart to make connections to other people. But it’s not about you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. That model of social media just isn’t sustainable.

That’s not even a good example of friendship or smart networking with a connection.

I can BUY that kind of favor – why waste it on a vote when they could help me build my list directly instead? If you’re cashing in your favors only on social media, you’re not that bright.

That’s right. I said it.

And I mean it. If you’re doing that, stop it, and give me your money, even though I just insulted you. Because logically you know I’m right and I’ll come up with a much better plan.

Seriously though, if you’re only connecting to people for what they can do for you in social media, and you know enough people that this exercise would be worthwhile, it’s smarter just to buy traffic, and save those favors for something smart like joint ventures, list building, or links.

Oh I almost forgot the irony part I was talking about earlier.

I found his post on Sphinn.

I Sphunn it and I don’t know him. I’ve read five articles there that I did not like, and thus, did not Sphinn. All five were by people I knew. And yes, not everyone uses Sphinn or other bookmarking/news sites the way I do. But the software itself defeats a great deal of the potential fraud.

I’ll close with an edited part of the comment I left him yesterday. I don’t know if he’ll publish it, because he has comment moderation turned on, and I wanted to save the most important part of my comment.

…you’re right. SB sites aren’t “for” making friends and socializing, but as part of SOCIAL media, SOCIAL, is, in fact, part of the idea. And though your votes shouldn’t come as a direct result of that, [the social aspect] is going to factor in at some point. However if your major point were correct, every single one of my posts would have the same number of votes as I do friends on each site, and no more.

Also, people vote for different reasons. I’m Sphinning you not because I think you wrote a great article, not because I think you’ll publish my comment, but because I think you brought up as issue that while misguided, does shed light on important issues.

I don’t know you, nor do I think your post is entirely correct or even in line with the way I think. And yet I voted for you. Happens to me all the time….

It’s true that I tend to take special note of my friends content on each site – but I don’t vote for all their content, and I don’t vote every time. Hell, whether or not the button is on their page makes more of a difference than whether they’re my friends.

I’ll give you that I tend to read all my pals contributions.

But it would screw up my Own rep to be a voting whore. So, if for no other reason than self interest, your theory on SB sites is seriously flawed. The friendships come as a Result of good community work on SB sites. Not the other way around.

If you think this is an important issue, Sphinn his article. Let’s start a dialogue about the issue.

And, since everything in the whole world is ultimately about me, , as a reward for reading this long ranty post on the issue, you should know that I’m going to be releasing a very cheap guide that covers how to leverage your social media activitie into more traffic without bucking the system.

It will include an explanation of why leveraging your connections is only good for the initial momentum (and why that’s okay.) I’ll announce it on the blog when it’s ready.

Photo linked to original on Flickr.

< rant >

Last time I actually counted, method by method, of my own knowledge, there are about 1991 unique methods you can use to draw traffic to your site.

(I.E. “submit to Digg” and “submit to Sphinn” are not two different traffic methods. They are the same tip, and if you list them that way, you’re a CHEATER. They fall under the same heading “Submit to social bookmarking sites.”)

Half of those traffic methods are free.

None of them is “comment on other blogs”.

That’s not a traffic method in and of itself – it’s a corollary to creating relationships between you and other bloggers. Forming relationships is always better marketing than getting a quick link.

I said “Forming relationships is always better marketing than getting a quick link.”

People running around giving one-off comments, but then don’t understand why they aren’t getting comments at their site.

Let’s get back to why commenting isn’t a traffic method though. I was counting the number of traffic methods I know for sure, 1991.

To get that number, rather than pick common tips that people give in their lovely link bait lists, I go by actionable steps whose actions you can reasonably expect to result in an actual new visitor like “form relationships with bloggers at y social bookmarking site, then submit x type of article to them, at this time of day if you can.”

Sure, linkbait is awfully cute, but at the end of the day, if you aren’t doing it as part of some type of learning series, but for traffic alone, what are you really giving to the community?

101 more things to do, with no starting point on how to actually do them?

75 more ways to feel inadequate and helpless? Bah!

I’ve noticed the rise in paid commenting like everyone else, but I say, why pay attention to stupid people? They want attention and you’re giving it to them. I’d rather refer to their unethical ways in passing, saying only this – yeah, those people are dumb, to sell, to participate, to buy them. It’s just a matter of time before their spam gets caught, and it’s normally before they get any link love from DoFollow bloggers.

But let’s not waste the whole article on them. The title and the one paragraph is enough.

If you must use commenting as a traffic method, despite my warnings, why not split your blogging up, between writing, and participating in the blogosphere?

Go make sincere comments on blogs you love? And just leave your link where you may not have left a link at all before? No cost, and the comments are sincere.

But I don’t believe in commenting *as a traffic method* in and of itself. Commenting is a part of blogging, and certain parts of blogging can be used as a traffic draw (a traffic draw is still not a traffic method. Methods keep bringing you traffic over time).

But using comments just for traffic potential is

1. Cheating.
2. Ineffective.
3. Inefficient.
4. Technorati’s, and to a lesser extent, Google’s fault.

Yeah.

I said it.

If you want people to stop spamming your directory, Technorati, stop being lazy and create a better measure of authority. 100 regular links should not be equal to 100 links by authority sites, and the definition should go much further than the number or even quality of links.

(Despite my sniping, I have some respect for Technorati and a great deal of respect for Sifrey. I can still think they’re wrong, though.

Because I’m *adorable8, that’s why. Laugh darn you, it’s MONDAY!)

You know what great bloggers are doing?

They’re writing great blog posts, not chasing after links. And people who have 25,000 links are 7 out of 10 times older blogs with consistent voices from seasoned bloggers who understand the game, and thusly, they deserve their ranking.

But what about the other three who got into blogging after the culture of linking began to fail and cheated to get their ranking – shouldn’t they be displaced by quality bloggers who have smaller audiences?

(Not me. Though you’re a dear for thinking that. I can get traffic easily, I don’t need to depend on Technorati. I’m fighting for You.)

I blame Google too, but at least Google gives more weight to what they consider quality links.

But let’s get back to you, traffic and comment.

You want more traffic? Fine.

I would stick more to methods that have a reasonable expectation of bringing you clients, such as “place a 4 line classified ad in a popular ezine.”

Despite the fact that email is on the decline as part of marketing, the people who have properly fed and watered their email lists have some of the most loyal followers in the world. I read maybe ten emails lists religiously and give them my real, ISP email address.

All week I wait for them and am so happy when they arrive, because I’m sincerely interested in them. I know they’re trying to sell me something and I’m happy because I want to buy — because their last product improved my life/business/relationship/earning potentional/happiness.

Ezines still count as a traffic method.

“But Tinu!” you might be saying – though I have no idea why you think you need to shout. Use your inside voice.

“But Tinu,” you might be saying, correcting your volume. “I get traffic from links at sites where I leave comments.”

“As well you should, if you left a good, sincere, comment,” I would say, “Even better that you should get SEO-related credit for your link if you’re leaving good comments, which is why I DoFollow.

“But if you’re leaving a link to try and get over on someone, expect them to delete it. There’s no law that says they have to publish *any* link, let alone spammy nonsense.

Some people perceive leaving links with your comments a way to get over, but allow it anyway. Wouldn’t you rather leave a comment that could get you a few hundred visitors than one that could bring you a few dozen?”

“Um, yeah,” you might say, if you were a sane person. “How do I do that?”

“You read the next article for some quick tips.”

< /rant >

Since the first moment I decided that I would talk about Social Media for a week, I’ve been reluctant to do any specific type of posting. Instead, I spent the whole weekend thinking about what I was going to say, particularly about why I don’t have a book about Social Media or Web 2.0 out as it relates to traffic.

The reason I am so reluctant to start this conversation, is that I remember a few years ago when I let loose some thoughts and observations on RSS. It was right before 4th of July weekend of 2004 when I submitted “Get Your RSS Feed Listed at Yahoo in 5 Simple Steps.”.

By the time everyone came back from that weekend, the article was Everywhere. By everywhere I mean – think of a popular search engine or traffic publication that carries guest articles.

If they existed in 2004, they reprinted it or linked to it.

Image every expert you admire suddenly fixing their eyes on you.

That’s what happened to me.

You’d never believe me if I told you who bought that book from me, or the friends I made because of it. A lot of people started to listen to me and respect what I had to say. I didn’t invent RSS, mind you. And I wasn’t even the first person to talk about RSS – my voice just happened to be the most accessible at the time.

My first taste of wealth (and the initially unwanted taint of internet fame) was a result of that. It fueled my book sales like crazy, then my blog traffic, then more sales, and all sorts of really important, influential people began to respect me and take an interest in my thoughts and what I had to say.

It was wonderful for about a year – then I started to see RSS get exploited and misused. I started to see myself quoted on sales pages where it was not authorized, and my content was stolen – and sometimes sold to people when they could get it directly from me, free.

I don’t mean things LIKE what I was writing. I mean my own words, verbatim.

And they were using them to promote spammy techniques. A lot of ugly things came out of that period that I felt responsible for, and I started wondering why I didn’t keep my big mouth shut.

Eventually I realized that I can choose not to hold myself responsible for the way other people use power that they are introduced to or given. Just because someone links my name to a spam technique doesn’t mean that I’m to blame. I was naive about releasing the best selling book I’ve ever written so far, and thought it would be used for good.

I’m less naive now, but I also realize that most of what happened as a direct or indirect result of that particular publication was not only good, it was fantastic.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to write a book about Social Media. With the connections I could utilize, it would have been a “just add water” best seller, without any effort on my part. I could have written a how-to guide, priced it at $197, with no resale rights or any of that about two years ago and no one would have blinked.

Something bothered me about it. (It wasn’t the high price. My ebooks are worth ten times that much. I can say that with confidence – any of my clients would back me up on this. If you’re not one – go back and trace how much money you’ve made or saved from a technique I have taught you for free and you’ll see that I’m right.)

What bothered me was that if I wrote a book just about Social Media, the techniques, while powerful, would be out of context. No, first I needed to write a mega-resource on Traffic in general.

Not like you’ve seen before, where someone teaches you the one trick they know and rides that pony until it dies.

Not some 100 page guide that lists a bunch of good TIPS but doesn’t give you any METHODOLOGY or STRATEGY.

I’ve been there, and, sure it’s helped people.

I’ve done that and people have told me that I saved their business, and that’s a blessing.

But when it comes to giving I am really, really greedy. I am going to retire from web site promotion in the next seven to eight months and I want to leave a legacy that is going to follow me for years to come.

So I spent a lot of time rebuilding the membership site, creating new ideas for how people can get help with traffic, and putting it all together as a system – a systematic traffic process that can be applied to any business. Social Media is just one little corner of that. Blogging is just one speck of that knowledge.

You see, I believe the greatest gift I can give you is the ability to understand what is behind getting traffic to your site, and how to form a plan for traffic for any site. Then I can leave Morgan and Cindy with a business that can advise on a much higher level. It will be easier for them to manage, and they won’t have to deal with the nightmare of trying to be creative and a good marketer at the same time.

This week is about essentially giving parts of the initial social media book I was going to write away for free, right here on the site.

And I will put it across to you in a way that will help you understand why the Uprising of Social Media, the decline of Web 1.0 and the advent of Web 2.0 means death to the spammers, or at least to their effectiveness in the marketplace.

This means that after this week, I’m not going to write a book merely about Web 2.0 and traffic, because many Web 1.0 related traffic methods not only still work but work better, because so many people misused, and then abandoned them. I’m not going to write a book just about Web 3.0, or Social Media only.

I’ve created a huge resource about learning how to use traffic in all respects, from search engines, to article marketing, to social networking, to MySpace – all of it will be covered here. Yeah, it will start with some kind of package that includes an ebook. But it’ll be so much more, and it will be broken down into bite-sized pieces of strategy so you can actually get somewhere with your technique.

For those of you who weren’t here, and don’t remember when I made that promise before, understand that when I say I’m listening to what you want I mean it , 100%.

It took me over a year to build it, but now it’s almost ready for human viewing. It’s one of those projects that will never be finished… but when I launch it outside of the subscribers, there will be hundreds – literally hundreds – of traffic videos, audios and guides, most of them authored and/or by me.

Just the bonus package beats most of what is being sold as the traffic be-all and end- all on the market today.

Whether or not you need that kind of help, I hope you’ll enjoy our week on Social Media. It’s going to be really different from the what-is, how-to-spam-2.0 discussions that are taking place now. I’m going to go beyond glossary terms, definitions and links, and tell you what this all means to you and your business and what to do about it.

Okay.

I’ve been really nice over the past 2-3 weeks. But if I don’t get this off my chest, I fear that my aneurysm is going to explode.  And I don’t want to have to clean up the mess.

On the telly, on the radio, in the newspapers everyone is saying, “June 21st is/was the longest day of the year”.  I even heard it today on NPR, during the “Wait, wait, don’t tell me” program.  June 21st is not the longest day of the flipping year – all days of the year are 24 hours (approx).  June 21st is the day wherein we have the most sunshine (in the Northern Hemisphere).

It is not a hot water heater.  It is a water heater. If the water was hot, then why would you need a heater.

How often do you hear this – “Can I have a double latte”?   It’s  “May I have a double latte!”?    And where’s the ‘please’.

There is only one ‘r’ in Sherbet.  Don’t believe me – go look at the carton.

It’s not your perogative. It’s prerogative.

There is no such word as irregardless.  It’s simply regardless.

I’ve got about two more pages of this stuff, but I want to go do something else, so I shall.

Morgan

I was catching up on some comments at some of my other sites. And someone questioned the fact that I occasionally say that my colleagues should charge more for their products.

It is one thing when someone just point blank asks you why you do something.

It’s another when they accuse you of having some other motive, when all of your other actions online CLEARLY state something different.

With all the free stuff I give away, and resources I point to, and blog posts that I could turn into ebooks and charge for instead, do I REALLY seem like the kind of person who just says things so I can make sixteen more bucks this month.

LMAO!

Out of about 100 products of the thousands I am asked to review and reccommend, I’ve said that a person should have charged more about, maybe five times. I mean it every time.

The reason why is that if you create a product that should be priced at $77 and you charge $47 for it, if you’re not taking all the related factors into consideration, you can put yourself out of business, just by having a popular product.

I see it all the time and it breaks my heart to see a person who could do so much, for so many people, crush their own business and not even know it. It’s a hard lesson to learn. There’s pricing something fairly, and there’s pricing somethng so low that it’s going to end up costing you money down the road. It can even cause you to do a disservice to your clients.

How can you provide support for a product if you priced it so low that you don’t have time to support your clients — because you are forever too busy creating the next product so you can have more money… to create the next product?

You’ll put yourself on a treadmill that you can’t get off. It took me YEARS to recover the first time I underpriced a product. Literally years. It was my first best seller and if I’d charged just five more dollars per unit in the beginning, I could have done so much more of my free services, and would have been able to create at least two jobs.

I know a lot of people will say “You should have priced this higher” with a wink, to try to get the person who created the product to charge more, so they can make more money.

I’ll tell you what – I love making more money, but even ten dollars more per sale in affiliate money is chump change to me, and to most other people that are actually well known enough to have their names highlighted as testimonials on other people’s products.

Not to mention that the majority of the time, if you’ve already set a price point, changing it without notice would kill all your sales, so that would actually make everyone LESS money.

So yeah, there’s an equally long response to that comment in my other newsletter if you care to peruse it.

But I thought it would bear repeating – underpricing your products WILL put you out of business. It almost happened to me twice, once when I was a newbie, and again this year. Since most of my revenue depends on my clients being in existence next year – yes, I do care in terms of dollars and sense.

I’m Proud to be an American and I’ll never be ashamed of being a capitalist.

But the almighty dollar is never my reason for giving someone a compliment, or public advice.

Price your products failrly. But don’t make yourself broke either.

You could have stayed working a day job and done that.

But

1. I don’t actually hate it.
2. It’s totally summer.

It just annoys the crap out of me sometimes. I’m really trying to be on its team, and gave serious consideration to switching back to IE from Firefox. But when it does things like double post my WordPress entries? Not so much endearing.

No. Not at all. And I hate when I can’t make a new tab, when selecting new tabs. Because no, I don’t want the content to load in this window. That’s why I clicked what? New. Tab.

My name’s Tinu, and I’m a feedaholic.

I love the sophisticated surfers I get to my site via my own feed, I love how much the search engine spiders love my feeds, and I simply adore reading sites via their RSS Feeds. I do the majority of my research for my column that way.

If your site doesn’t have one and you want to be featured in one of my daily columns, you’re out of luck. It isn’t that there aren’t great sites out there with great tools out there that aren’t feed-capable, it’s just that now that I use web feeds as my primary source of news, unless your site was featured in someone else’s feed, it just wouldn’t occur to me.

To folks like me, your site is effectively invisible, unless you happen to come up on the first page of a search, and since I know where to go to find the information I want quickly, I don’t use a search engine on a daily basis.

True story.

But why should you care. I’m just one isolated surfer, a special case, a techie, a feed nut.

Wrong friend.

We feed readers may be in the minority for now, but we’re a powerful, educated, relatively wealthy group of consumers. In my free course about RSS , I’ll tell you the demographics as quoted from a study done by blogads.com – it’s a little skewed because of the pool of consumers they surveyed, but it’s no less telling of the group studied.

Some hints: we’re a middle-aged group with the money to spend on your premium products. The way you might skim past a product priced at $3.99 is the way we might skip over a $25 ebook – particularly if we can hire someone to do the work for us, for the same reason: we’re looking for a balance of quality and price.

I’m not pointing this out to be mean, or insinuate that your site is less than top quality. I’m just telling you what you’re missing by not having a feed on your site.

Mull that over while I post the next tip.