What it really comes down to is that I’m working on finding a way to bring good, solid marketing skills and authenticity, honesty and integrity together in my marketing messages.  Watch the video below to see exactly what I’m on about:

So, what are your thoughts on this? Of all the marketers you know, how many of them are closer to the “marketing machine” end of the scale and how many are more authentic?

And from which of those have you bought more?

I’d love to hear what you have to say, so leave a comment!

Cheers,

This post is about those two methods and how you can implement them in your own marketing.

Eben Pagan’s Massive Free Content

The expression “free line” was coined by Eben Pagan. He is an advocate of “pushing back the free line”. In other words: Give away tons of value for free, then charge a premium for your higher-end content.

Pagan definitely lives this philosophy. The most recent example of this can (still) be seen on the pre-launch blog for his latest product, Guru Blueprint. Not only did he give away massive value in about half a dozen videos before the product launch, he even continued updating the blog after the launch with some extras like an interview.

I recommend you go take a look at that blog. It shows the kind of free line content that most people are scared to give away, because it seems like “too much”. His product is about creating and selling information products and on the pre-launch blog, you can easily find enough information to start a successful info products business, if you apply the methods in the videos and use some initiative. This begs the question: Why would anyone buy the product if they’re already getting so much stuff for free? Since Guru Blueprint sold out in a few days, I’d say that for whatever reasons, Eben’s approach to the free line works.

Further Examples

Search for “Eben Pagan” or “David DeAngelo” (that’s his pen-name) on YouTube and you’ll find no shortage of further free-line content that Eben has produced. For example, here’s a channel where he’s giving away lots of great productivity advice in 14 videos.

Pros and Cons

This kind of free line content is one of the best ways to build a reputation, get lots of exposure (through sites like YouTube) and grow a mailing-list (if you put some of the free content “behind” an opt-in form). For long-term, large business projects, I reckon nothing beats Eben-style free content.

The problem with this method is that you need to have wide and deep knowledge of your subject matter, otherwise it’s impossible to apply. After all, the kind of content you’re giving away is equal to or more than many people put into their premium products. If you only know a little about a subject, that might be enough to put together a $7 ebook, but it won’t be nearly enough to create this kind of free line content.

In other words: You need to be an expert to make this happen.

Ryan Deiss/Perry Belcher’s Really Hot Tip

Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher are both extremely successful and well-known marketers who have partnered on many projects. I mention them both here, because I really don’t know where the “hot tip” comes from, but I’m pretty sure it’s one (or both) of those two guys.

The “hot tip” concept works like this: People have a very short attention span and are looking for instant gratification. So, don’t offer an entire ebook or complex training program for free. Offer one simple, really hot tip instead.

A good example of this is the million dollar napkin by Ryan Deiss. As you can see, the free tip you get for signing up fits on a napkin. You get a simple squeeze page that tells you what you’re about to get (and it’s clear that what you’re about to get is short and sweet) and you need to opt in to get to the next page and see the goodies.

Strangely enough, there are now multiple bonuses and downloads once you opt-in for the million dollar napkin, so it might not be the perfect example anymore. But the concept is clear: You don’t offer something huge and complex; you offer something short and cool.

Further Example

Ironically, the best example of the “hot tip” was created by none other than Eben Pagan and was called the “Kiss Test”. Unfortunately, it seems that it no longer exists in it’s original form.

Here’s how it worked: You arrive at the squeeze page and see that you can learn one simple technique that will help you tell with 100% certainty whether your date is ready to be kissed. Enter your name and e-mail to learn this simple technique.

That’s it.

If you opt-in, you arrive on the next page, where you read about the Kiss Test (which is only a few paragraphs).

Very simple and very powerful. Think about it: If you’re a guy in the dating market, you’ll instantly give your e-mail address to learn something like the Kiss Test!

Pros and Cons

The big advantage of this approach is that your freebie is relatively easy to create. Sure, you need to do some good research to find one tip that really has enough pulling power as a “hot tip”. The hot tip you’re giving away is like the first impression you make on your prospect, so if it’s a half-assed piece of advice or something that’s practically common knowledge, you’re losing your credibility and basically ruining any further efforts you make to market to your list.

Bottom Line

Essential for both free line approaches is that you build a backend that you can make money off of. The simples form of a backend is simply your mailing list. You can use your free content to get people on your list and then market to them down the line. As an affiliate, using the “Hot Tip” method and then promoting affiliate offers is probably one of the easiest ways to start building a solid income-basis (did I just give away a big “secret”?).

If you do Pagan-style free content, then it’s almost a given that you need to have your own products to sell. However, in both cases, it’s ideal if you also build a simple funnel after the opt-in, i.e. you add “bonuses” or upsells to the thank-you page, maybe a downsell via exit-script etc. You get the idea.

How do you utilise free content? What do you need to know to get started with either of the above methods? Let me know in the comments!

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Anyway, on to the actual topic. About once a month, something or other happens, that gets a lot of people all worried about the “end of online marketing”! Be it a new feature Google introduces (personalized search, anybody?), some rules changing (e.g. new Facebook advertisement rules), marketer’s accounts getting banned (AdWords, Blogger,…) or anything else along those lines. Whenever something like that happens, you can count on a lot of wailing about how the days of making easy money online are finally counted etc. etc.

Well, here’s an interesting counter-argument:

Is this thing accurate? I don’t know.

Is it a good illustration of the fact that the Internet is simply far too vast for the human mind to comprehend and that opportunities for businesses and growth are mind-bogglingly numerous? Hell yes!

Cheers,

Sounds like a great plan, right? I made a video in which I’m being a total spoil-sport talking about some of the real-life implications of starting a web design and optimization service like this. I also offer some useful advice for anyone who wants to give this method a try.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think about the local-business marketing fad? I’d love to hear your opinion, so feel free to leave a cooment below!

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• offline business marketing

Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

In this post, I explain a big problem I see with “Make Money Online” guides and what I want to change on RQR because of this. Also, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t post for a long time, I’ll briefly explain at the end of this post.

All Marketing and No Content a.k.a. The Newbie Trap

As I said, I had been looking to review several products lately, but ended up not reviewing them. Why? Basically, because I was disappointed in them. I was so disappointed, that I couldn’t even be bothered to go through all of the material and if I don’t do that, then I can’t write a proper review.

Now, on the one side, I feel almost obliged to write about bad products, so that some people might be saved from buying them. On the other hand, however, I have more important things to do with my time than going through sub-par training courses just to write a review.

The problem with many of the products I looked at is the same that Banner Ad Blueprint has: They are made by pure marketers – people who know everything about creating a great offer and nothing about teaching.

This type of product is usually set up as a “Newbie Trap”: Make huge promises to an audience that doesn’t really know much about marketing and then feed them some rehashed crap once they bought the product (and fought past half a dozen upsells).

–

Real Marketing Products

Instead of writing a ton of negative reviews about products like these, I want to make one general recommendation: Always think twice about a “how to make money online” guide. Most of them seem to be lacking in quality. There is a separate category of products that are much more often worth an investment and these are what I call “real” marketing products.

Real marketing products are tools and services that can leverage what you’re already doing to make money. For example, the recently reviewed WP Split Test plugin for WordPress is quite such a program. It’s quite simple and it serves to split-test your WordPress posts. It doesn’t claim to make you tons of money overnight, but it actually has more money-making potential than most of the guides I’ve read lately.

Further examples of “real” marketing products include keyword research tools, automation tools and services, programs like The Best Spinner, which helps leverage article marketing, programs like Web2Mayhem to help spread content around the web and things like rank tracking and analysis software.

–

No Love For Guides?

I won’t be seeking out guides and ebooks to review from now on. That doesn’t mean I’ll never review them again, just that I will be concentrating more on the “real” products mentioned above.

The question is, of course: What is a beginner to do? You have to learn the basics of Internet marketing somehow, after all. Well, for this purpose, I’ll be building a library of ebooks to cover all of the essentials. WordPress Websites Made Easy is the first in this series of guides and just like it, all of the following ones will be free.

I hope to be able to provide you with everything you need to know to make your first steps in online marketing and I want to provide all this for free. My motives aren’t entirely altruistic, either. I’ve been getting more and more questions in my inbox and I want to be able to point you to guides I’ve already written, so that I don’t have to type out long responses.

Also: Pretty soon you’ll have to sign up to my list in order to download the free stuff. Then, I’ll spam you with pre-written mails for every big Internet marketing product launch that comes along. And if you believe that last sentence, you must be new here. Welcome to RQR!

Anyway, that’s all for now and I’d love to get some feedback from you. Do you think this is a good plan? What kinds of products do you want to see reviewed the most? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

P.S.: About my hiatus: I took some time off to clean out my life. Cleaned out my apartment, sold a lot of junk I had lying around and cleaned up my mind in the process. That was really good, believe me. Then, I also caught some bloody virus and my camera stopped working, which also delayed further production of blog-posts. I hope you all missed me! (Yeah, I know, you didn’t even notice my absence, did you?)

A few days ago, Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger), Chris Brogan (Trust Agents), Sonia Simone and Brian Clark (both Copyblogger) launched a new membership site called “The Third Tribe”. You’ve probably heard of it, since it made something of a splash.

This post is not another Third Tribe rant. Others have already done that better than I ever could. If you take just one thing from this post, let it be this: Go to Griz’s Third Tribe review and read it. It makes a more than excellent case and is very much worth reading.

If you take another thing from this post, then it’s a clearer and less biased overview of Internet marketing “tribes” that follows below:

Third Tribe

First, here’s the skinny on the Third Tribe:

This product is marketed using a common marketing technique: You establish a scenario in which there is a very apparent need and then you fill that need. This is often described as “creating the market for your product”. As I’m sure you are aware, every product should have some kind of a unique selling proposition (USP) that answers the modern consumers ever-present question: “Why should I buy this instead of one of the other, similar products on offer?”

It’s not always easy to create a USP for your product, especially in saturated markets such as “make money online”. What the Third Tribe says, is: “So far, there were two tribes in Internet marketing: Slimey, dishonest and obnoxious sales-types and hippy social media types who want to be everyone’s friend and are all broke. Now, there’s the third option: Real, honest, non-obnoxious marketing that will still fill your pockets with cash!”

It’s a pretty clever setup, in my opinion. Of course, it’s dead wrong, but what can you expect from something you see on a sales-page?

–

Tribe or No Tribe?

As I’ve confessed previously, I’m a bit of an information junky and I spend more time than is reasonable on different forums, reading blogs, ebooks, books etc. about Internet marketing. It seems to me that there really are certain types or tribes of Internet marketers, all coming at this same subject from a different angle.

Below, I list the groups and types of marketers I’ve encountered online. What can you get from reading about this? You might be surprised at how many different online marketing philosophies and methods exist and you might get some new ideas and a fresh perspective.

–

The Bums

As far as I know, Travis Sago is the guy who coined the term Bum Marketing. The term simply comes from the fact that bum marketing methods all rely on free traffic sources (i.e. a bum could afford it). Many beginners in Internet marketing start out with some variation of bum marketing, relying on article directories, Squidoo/Hubpages, free blogs and classifieds to make their first few dollars.

Bum marketers also seem to have a certain affinity towards Clickbank and the Amazon affiliate program and the most successful among them tend to produce a very large volume of articles every day, often making use of article spinning to get more mileage out of their work.

Bum Marketing:
Write lots of articles, get traffic and rankings for free.

–

The SEO’s

The SEO’s are all about getting free traffic via search engines (primarily Google). There’s quite a bit of overlap between the SEO and the Bum tribes, since both swear by free traffic.

While the bum marketer mostly drives traffic to articles on article directories, the SEO drives traffic to self-hosted websites. Articles may or may not be a means towards this end. SEO’s often make use of social bookmarking, profile-links, article and video distribution, three-way link-swaps (not as kinky as it sounds) and other methods to get more and better backlinks to their highly optimized pages. They are also often engaged in heated debates among each other, since no one really knows how the Google algorithm works, but everyone has their theories.

SEO:
Keyword research, optimization and lots of link-building.

–

The Involved Marketers/Product Creators

Involved marketing (I got this term from the Smart Passive Income blog) is all about being transparent, open and honest, getting out there, getting in touch with people and building a “personal brand”. Think Gary Vaynerchuk.

Involved marketers spend a lot of time building relationships with their potential customers and are often heavily involved in social media platforms like facebook, twitter and Digg. They also tend to make more use of video than marketers of other tribes.

Since involved marketing is all about personal branding and transparency, these marketers are often also product creators. After all, once you’ve built real trust and you become recognizable and liked by the crowd in your niche, selling something made by yourself makes the most sense.

Involved Marketing:
Build relationships, create a fan-base and sell your own products and services.

–

The Traffic-Arbitrage Crowd

Why work your butt off to get pages and articles ranked in search engines and to get people to notice and like you when all you need to do is give a search engine or CPV company some money to get floods of traffic almost instantly? That’s the question that describes the Traffic Arbitrager’s take on online marketing.

These marketers have an affinity towards CPA offers and a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google, since AdWords has enormous traffic-potential but also strict rules and a twitchy trigger-finger when it comes to banning accounts.

Paying for traffic is something of a daring gamble and for everyone who hits it big-time and starts making unspeakable amounts of money in a short time, using PPC or CPV, there are hundreds who lose a lot of money and give up before they ever see a dime in return.

Marketers in the traffic-arbitrage tribe are perhaps the most technical and tend to spend more time and effort with testing, tracking and tweaking than marketers in any of the other crowds.

Traffic Arbitrage:
It’s all about the ROI. And the CTR, and the CPC, and the EPC,…

–

The Bloggers

Blogging is another thing many beginners in online marketing get into. One hears stories about people making fortunes with blogs and there are many “blogging for money” related products and, of course, blogs.

Bloggers, like involved marketers, are all about building a community and connecting with others. They leave comments on other blogs, write guest posts and do the social media thing.

Blogs can be monetized using ad-space, AdSense, promoting affiliate products in posts or as platforms for selling self-made products.

Since blogging is as public as it is, in this tribe, the vast discrepancy between the few who make it big and the thousands who struggle to make a dime is very apparent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that making money from a blog is more difficult than making money with “real” marketing, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered, I happen to believe so.

Blogging for Money:
Become Internet-famous.

–

Conclusion

People have a strong tendency to form groups and identify with them. They also have a very strong tendency to think of themselves and their own group as superior to others.

You will see that in each of the above mentioned online marketing tribes, there are people who are very firm in their belief that their way of doing things is the only “right” way or the only “real” way of making money online and that all the others are just scammers, time-wasters and/or idiots.

For this reason alone I encourage anyone to become familiar with more than one method and more than one crowd. Wherever you are involved, if you get in too deep and follow just one direction, you’re always blinding yourself to many opportunities and ideas that can be found outside of your particular tribe.

What tribe do you belong to? Or do you think this entire concept is rubbish? What about the Third Tribe, do you have a rant about that you need to get off your chest? The comments are all yours!

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

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If you’re on a few Internet marketing mailing lists, you’ve no doubt received plenty of messages endorsing twittollower, a new twitter automation service. twittollower is not unique in what it does: Programs like Hummingbird, tweetadder and many, many more have been around for quite a long time already. But twittollower is unique in the way it’s being marketed and it’s at the same time amusing and fascinating.

Let’s have a look at what twitter automation does in general and what sets twittollower apart. Oh, and in case you’re already rolling your eyes because you can’t take another endorsement for this service: Don’t worry, this is definitely not an endorsement.

Twitter Automation in General

Okay, let’s have a quick look at the basics: For marketing purposes, what you want to achieve on twitter is to get as many people as possible following you, you want those people to be interested in what you tweet about (and more importantly, what you sell) and you want them to be responsive (i.e. tweet back when you ask a question and click on links when you tweet them).

The problem is that you can’t make people follow you on twitter. All you can do is send tweets and follow other people.

Sometimes, when you follow someone, they will follow you back. Not always, but following people and hoping for re-follows is basically the best shot you have at growing your follower count from within twitter.

Since there are certain limits to how many people you can follow and you probably don’t want to spend all day tending to your twitter account(s), this is where the automation comes in.

–

Hummingbird, tweet adder and twittollower

I have picked out two more twitter automation systems out of dozens, maybe hundreds that are available. The reason is simply that these two are, as far as I can tell, the most popular and best-established systems among the pack.

Hummingbird and tweet adder are very similar. Both are software programs that you download and run from your desktop. They connect to your twitter account (or multiple accounts) through the twitter API. Both of them let you search for people in your market in various ways (keyword search in member profiles, tweets etc.), you can set them to automatically follow a certain amount of people each day, according to certain criteria, you can tell them to un-follow people who are not following you back and to follow people who follow you, but you aren’t following yet.

You can also use them to schedule tweets and send automatic direct messages to people who follow you. Those aren’t all the features these two programs offer, but you get the idea.

Now, here’s the really interesting thing:

tweet adder costs $55 if you want to use it for just one account, $74 if you want to use if for five accounts and $188 if you want to use it with an unlimited amount of accounts.

Hummingbird costs $97 and lets you use unlimited accounts.

twittollower, on the other hand, costs $97 per month, for just one account.

And as far as I know, this was the introductory price and it’s about to increase.

–

twittollower = Magic

How can twittollower possibly survive against established competition that is available at a fraction of the cost? After all, even the most expensive option, the unlimited tweet adder service, costs less than twittollower by the third month you’re using it.

Surprisingly though, twittollower is doing quite well (at least, as far as I can tell).

The reason for this is simple and you’ll see it if you go and have a look at the sales-video. Now, the sales-video might change once they increase the price, but currently, it’s a pretty long video that you can’t navigate through (if you try, it always skips back to the beginning of the video) and it features Tahir Shah trying his best to use hypnotic suggestions and your typical “NLP-talk” throughout the video (yes, he’s definitely trying too hard).

It also doesn’t feature any explanations of what twittollower actually does.

The video goes to great lengths to tell you about how incredibly powerful twitter is and how it’s going to make you millions and how twittollower does everything on autopilot and how it will “get people to follow you” etc. But it never tells you what really goes on in the background. It doesn’t list any features.

And that’s where the magic lies.

With something like tweet adder, you clearly see that it’s a program and it requires user-input and then it goes and does certain things. In fact, it gives you a lot of control over the things it does, so it’s almost entirely transparent.

twittollower, on the other hand, just tells you that it will make your twitter following grow at an amazing rate and that you’ll make tons of money from those followers and that they should be charging $900 a month for it (they really do say that in the video).

In other words: A “common” twitter automation system is a useful tool, while twittollower will magically fulfil your dreams all by itself.
I think it’s clear to see which one of those options is more enticing.

For all we know, when you sign up with twittollower, someone creates a tweet adder or Hummingbird account for you and does the basic setup. We’ll never know and that’s why we’re willing to pay much, much more for twittollower than for those other tools.

–

What Else is New?

If you’ve seen a fair amount of IM product launches, this won’t be news to you. Practically every get-rich-quick system has a sales-pitch that is heavy on hopes and dreams and promises of money and very thin on factual information.

At the end of the day, this kind of promotion just gets more sales and allows for higher prices.

On the one hand, you can look at your own sales-processes and ask yourself if you’re applying this method as well. On the other hand, you can ask yourself if you want to be part of the dream-sellers or not.

As for twitter automation: It’s something I’ll probably take a stab at, sometime. You’ll get a nice round of reviews out of it, of course. For now, though, I have other priorities.

Have you tried any twitter automation system? What’s been your experience? Or what do you think of this whole twittering and dream-selling business in general? I’d love to hear your thoughts down in the comments!

Cheers,

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Here’s how this works:

Step 1: You watch the video below, in which Gary Vaynerchuk says a lot of awesome things, then makes a huge blunder and then says some more awesome things.

Step 2: Watch the next video, below the first one, where I rant about how incredibly wrong Gary was with his statements about Internet marketing.

Step 3: Read the few paragraphs at the end, where I elaborate on some essential points.

GO

Video Interview: Dean Hunt, Ciaran Doyle and Gary Vee

–

My Response

–

Some Important Points

First of all, in my video it almost comes off as if I’m saying all offline businesses or all big corporate businesses are unethical. That wasn’t my intention, of course.

My point is simply that there are unethical businesses and ethical businesses, online as well as off. Likewise, there “good” marketing and marketing that “just isn’t right” as Gary puts it. And this is also true online as well as offline.

Note that I’m not saying all  Internet marketing is good and holy. There’s a lot of spammy and scammy marketing going on, online. And unfortunately, the spammiest marketers are usually the most prevalent, the ones you encounter most often and the ones that you get annoyed by the most frequently.

Internet marketing as a whole is no better and no worse than non-Internet marketing. However, a large portion of online marketing consists of individuals or small groups that are very busy producing great value for free and building lasting relationships with relatively small groups of customers. And if more people get involved in this type of marketing and the paradigm shifts ever further in that direction, then that’s clearly a blessing for everyone involved.

At least, that’s my take on this. What do you think?

Step 4: Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

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I have read so many posts on the subject of “Content is King” lately, that I feel I need to chime in on this. Now, don’t worry, RQR will never turn into a “blogging about blogging” blog. Stuff like this will remain the exception and I’ll usually leave it to the blogging-bloggers.

For today, though, I want to shed some much-needed light on the “Content is King” theme. And yes, I’ll also explain why the hell I have a picture of 50 cent up there.

NOTE: This is, once again, a text/video hybrid post, so if you don’t feel like reading, just head on down and watch the video.

Challenging the Crown

The whole “Content is King” thing advocates that the most important thing you need to do as a blogger is create good content and everything else will eventually follow. In other words, content is more important than SEO, more important than promotion/marketing, more important than community interaction, etc.

Different proponents of CiK go to different lengths in how much they value content over everything else, but no matter how you look at it, content and content alone simply is not king.

–

Fiddy Knows

Here’s where 50 cent comes in. I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that Fiddy is an amazingly successful guy. Right, so he’s definitely made it in terms of getting attention, being in the spotlight, being talked about as well as making craploads of cash.

But guess what? His music is not the best music on the planet.

And that’s his content, by the way. Music is a musician’s content, just like blog posts are a blogger’s content. Fiddy did not make it to his level of success merely by merit of the quality of his music. I’m not saying his music is bad, I’m simply pointing out that the quality of his content is not in direct relation to how much success and money he has.

And the same is true for blogs. How much more traffic does a post on Problogger get, compared to a post on your blog? I’m guessing it’s probably in the thousands or tens-of-thousands times more. Is the content on Problogger a thousand times better than the content on your blog? Unless you’re just banging your head against the keyboard, the answer is: hell no!

It may be better, but it’s not better in proportion to how much more successful it is.

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Biased Preachers

The problem is that many of the most adamant preachers of the CiK creed are completely biased. If you are a so called “A-list” blogger with a hugely popular blog, then sure, you don’t have to do any promotion of your content. Your vast army of readers is going to do more promotion than you could ever do yourself, anyway. And yes, the better the content you produce as an A-lister, the greater the response from you readership will be and the more promotion of your content you will see your readers do.

So, for an A-list blogger, content may truly be king. But not the same is not true 99.9% of bloggers.

In fact, the closer you are to being an A-lister, the more over-ruling content becomes, because more and more promotion of your content is being done by the people who already know you and your blog. But especially if you are starting out with a blog, just producing top content will simply not cut it.

Apart from content-promotion, there is another very important factor to online success.

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You vs. Gary Vaynerchuk

Let’s look at a practical example: Check out this post by Gary: Secret 2.0 (go ahead, it’ll only take a few seconds)

That post got 208 retweets, 90 comments and around 50 links to it. The video has been viewed almost 8’000 times on Viddler.

Let’s just pretend that Gary had never made that video and that instead, you had made it and posted it. How would the reaction to that have been?

Well, I don’t know, of course, because I don’t know who you are (you should introduce yourself in the comments), whether you have a blog (though you probably do) and where that blog can be found (again, comments).

But I can give you an estimate of what would have happened if that video had been made by me and posted on my blog instead of by Gary on his. I’m guessing it would have gotten around 20 views, maybe as much as 40, no more than one comment and certainly no retweets or links.

And that’s partially because RQR has not been around for very long. But it’s also because content alone doesn’t matter.

The fact that I’m using something by Gary Vaynerchuk as an example here is actually slightly ironic, because he’s a great believer in marketing content and “getting in the trenches” as he calls it. Still, due to the nature of that video, it’s the perfect example for what I want to illustrate, here.

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So Who’s King?

A statement like “X is King” is very compelling because it’s so very simple. Unfortunately, in real life, things tend to be a bit more complex. You can’t narrow the reason for a blog’s or website’s success down to one factor alone, no matter how much you would like to believe that there’s one “secret” to making it big-time.

If you really want to simplify things, then narrow it down to at least these three factors:

1. Quality Content
2. Excellent Marketing
3. Perceived Value/Perceived Authority

In more detail:

Quality Content
Pretty self-explanatory, really. If your content sucks, then any promotion you do for it will be fruitless. Of course, good content is a necessary basis for a successful site, but it doesn’t end there.

Excellent Marketing
This is where Fiddy really shines. That guy is an amazing marketer. You have to get maximum, positive exposure for your material. You have to give people who have no idea who you are or what you might be offering a chance to find your content. Otherwise, it simply doesn’t matter how good that content is.
Excellent marketing can mean a thousand different things and can be done in countless different ways, but the objective is always to reach new audiences and remind existing customers/readers to come back and check out your new stuff.

Perceived Value or Authority
This is a factor I’ve never seen mentioned by anyone else. See, the main reason a video gets more attention if it’s made by Gary than if it’s made by me (assuming identical content) is because is because of perceived authority and value. When Gary says something, it’s automatically a hundred times more awesome than when I say the same thing. Why? Because of what he calls personal branding. Because you know and respect and like who Gary is, but you don’t really know who I am.
Personal branding is not the only way to increase perceived value, however. Other common methods include making use of high prices, high-end looking design, association with authority figures or institutions and exclusivity (“limited offer”). And there are many, many more techniques that can be used to increase the perceived value or authority of any product or website.

Ultimately, none of these three factors are “King”, because if any one factor is missing, you’ve got nothing.

If your content sucks, everything else doesn’t matter.
If you don’t do any promotion whatsoever, you’ll be stuck with those four accidental viewers per day for a very long time.
If people don’t perceive your content to be valuable in any way and don’t take you seriously at all, they will only visit to have a laugh (and even that won’t last).

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Dude, I’m a Marketer, Not a Blogger

Ok, so let’s take this a bit closer to Internet marketing land: The same principle holds true for any kind of content you put online. It’s true for a squeeze page, a sales-page, an ad (written or graphical) and anything else you can think of.

Unless you work on the quality of the content, promote that content intelligently and make sure that you and/or your offer come across as authoritative and valuable respectively, you’ll never see many visitors, comments or sales.

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Here’s me ranting about this on video:

Let me know about your thoughts on this much-discussed topic. Do you agree? Or did I get it all wrong?

Cheers,

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