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.
