There are many upsides of social media work for the internet marketer, but, tragically, one of the downsides is that it has tricked a lot of people into thinking, if I retweet something in my marketplace that’s interesting, I’ve just done as much effort as if I’d created a piece of content and had others retweet. They think they’re doing something without actually doing something.
Retweeting is good, don’t get me wrong. It’s important to be the one who’s delivering information into your market. But when I started to look at market leadership, I said, ok, how are people becoming market leaders? At the time I was looking at this, Seth Godin wrote the book Tribes. He calls them tribe leaders, a great analogy. How do people become this?
I realized something, and this is where it hit me like a bolt from the blue. The only difference between someone who is active in their marketplace and one who is not, is their ability to put content into that marketplace. What I mean by content, it could be a blog post, it could be a pod cast, it could be a video, it could be a PDF, it could be an interview, it could be anything. But they are a net contributor into their marketplace. They have positions, they have a viewpoint and they participate.
By doing this, and by doing that on a regular basis, now all of a sudden people in that marketplace, you’re the one being retweeted. By the way, what happens when you’re retweeted? You’re getting back links. These are the best SEO techniques in the world. Create original content that has a point of view in whatever media. I don’t care about the medium. You can use photography as your medium. You could use drawings as your medium, but you are a direct contributor into the marketplace.
For me, this insight has changed everything. It’s not, unfortunately, without its downsides. As soon as I use the term leader, a lot of people would have flashbacks, where we would say here in Australia, dakked or wedgied in the PE room by the cheer leaders or the captain of the football team. There is often a negative connotation with the term leadership for a lot of people.
That corresponds exactly demographically with people who are shy about wanting to be involved in a marketplace. This is a human tragedy. Whatever happened in their past, means that they’re shy. Because of their shyness, they’re hesitant to put out something in the marketplace that could be criticized. So creating that content was a huge realization.
That’s all you have to do. I’m actually doing some tests at the moment. You pick a marketplace and you do this, within ninety days, people are talking about you. You publish content five days a week, not great content, because when you start, it won’t be great.
Everybody thinks Charles Dickens started out with ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. He did fifteen different versions of that opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities. Stephen King busts out content, then he has to go back and edit and edit it. What we see in his magnificent writing, is the product of all these editors and himself reviewing and reviewing. A Gary Halbert sales letter is the product of fifteen to twenty drafts, where it is refining and refining and editing.
Unfortunately in school we’re taught to edit as we go, which is tragic. If you check out any decent writer, who is a good content creator, they divorce content creation from editing. They just get the stuff done. It’s going to be rubbish, and accept that it is rubbish. They get the writing done. Content for SEO and otherwise need not be difficult, but simple SEO still needs attention to details.
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