When Eve stood under the apple tree and started talking to a snake, most people think that what she heard from the scaly slitherer was a bunch of slander directed at God. But what that serpent actually leaned over and whispered in her ear was this: Content is king.
It's been the mantra of the internet almost since its inception. It's the standard advice given to anyone and everyone, whether they're just starting a new web business or they're struggling with an existing one. It's not true, I'm not sure it's ever been true, but it definitely hasn't been true since at least 1997 when most of the stuff on the internet was crap anyway.
When someone says "content is king" they usually mean a couple of different things. Let's break this particular lie down by all the different definitions applied to it.
If You Build It, They Will Come
When dished out as advice to someone starting a new website, "content is king" is usually shouted out as a way of encouraging the internet noob, a way of telling them that the don't need to worry about getting visitors, if they do a good job they'll be rewarded for it.
The idea behind this notion is that internet users recognize quality when they see it, and they'll flock to it. In practical application it's supposed to mean that if you write better articles than your competitor, people will come read what you have to say instead of them. Or if you have higher quality images or video or products than that other guy who's competing against you, people will choose your site over theirs. The idea here is that whoever has the best content wins.
That's not true, and here's the all too obvious proof, using the simplest, most obvious example: Podcasts.
In theory podcasts aren't really driven by search engine traffic. They build their audiences almost entirely by word of mouth, and so that should make them the purest expression of the "content is king" principal. The word on the street is that no amount of SEO will make your podcast popular. It's up to the people. If the cream is going to rise to the top anywhere, it must be here. So, let's take a look at the most popular podcasts on iTunes. Here they are, in order from most popular to least:
1. This American Life
2. WNYC's Radiolab
3. Stuff You Should Know
4. NPR: Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me
5. Freakonomics Radio
6. The Adam Carolla Show
7. The Moth Podcast
8. NPR: Fresh Air
9. NPR: Car Talk Podcast
10. Harry Potter Podcast
That's the top ten. Six of those top ten podcasts are backed by old media radio stations and newspapers. Their popularity is a direct result of being promoted by and associated with those non-internet outlets. Two of them are hosted by celebrities in Adam Carolla and the now semi-famous authors of book turned movie "Freakonomics". They get their popularity, at least in part, by being associated with well known names. The Harry Potter Podcast is wholly owned by Warner Bros. and pushed through their content networks. It's basically an advertisement for their brand. The remaining podcast is "Stuff You Should Know" a podcast pushed by the well known content farm "How Stuff Works", a site reviled for its low quality content but high-dollar SEO.
Are some of those podcasts good? Sure. Did they earn their position in the top ten solely because they are good? Nope. if they had, then surely there'd be at least one podcast in the top ten from someone who wasn't already famous, on the air, or backed by blackhat SEO operatives before beginning their podcast career.
Want more proof?
Most Popular Business Podcast: The Dave Ramsey Show, a rebroadcast of a popular, syndicated radio show.
Most Popular Health Podcast: Savage Love, hosted by a famous author and TV personality.
Most Popular Music Podcast: NPR again.
Most Popular News & Politics Podcast: NPR again. #2 is a rebroadcast of parts of Bill Maher's TV show.
Most Popular Sports Podcast: ESPN of course.
Go through every category on iTunes. It's all corporations and celebrities. Nothing else.
All of these shows gained their popularity by being associated with some other, pre-existing brand whether it be Harry Potter, or NPR, or Adam Carolla. Content, even though some of it is good, had at best a minor role to play in their popularity.
Amongst the thousands upon thousands of podcasts currently on the internet, I feel confident in saying that somewhere out there is at least one podcast which is better than all ten of these top spot holders, but you'll never see that podcast listed in the iTunes top ten until that good content marries itself to an existing brand, or finds someone with the money necessary to advertise or promote it.
What this illustrates is that on the internet, just like everywhere else, content isn't king. Branding, money, and distribution are everything. You have to have something to advertise or direct people to, so content fits into the picture, but it's not everything. Content by itself, no matter how good, is utterly meaningless.
Google Cares About Content
But what about Google? Doesn't its search algorithm take into account the quality of the content on a website when determining how to rank them? Not really. Actually recent statements from Google have made it clear that they're beginning to focus more on promoting "trusted brands". Their algorithms look for things like inbound links and keyword density (which actually gets in the way of good writing most of the time). Google can't tell if something's well written or not and it doesn't care. It has no idea if the guy who wrote whatever it is that it just put in the #1 spot for "gardening advice" has any idea what he's talking about. It doesn't know if that image of Lindsay Lohan is a blurred out piece of crap or not. All it knows is that the page that stuff was on had a lot of keywords on it, and the person who owned that page had done the fancy SEO necessary to make Google believe his cat videos were worth its time.
Google not only doesn't care about content it doesn't really know what it is. Crafted properly, a bunch of useless gobbledeegook can rank higher than the most perfectly written article, easily, as long as it hits on all the right signals. SEO marketers make use of this and always will.
Some will tell you that the answer to this problem is social, let people vote for the best content and that way the cream rises to the top. This theory assumes that people know what good content is, or for that matter even care. Mostly they don't. The average internet user will "like" just about anything, if it's the first thing they see, without bothering to look for anything better.
It's this very reason why the competition to get on the first page of Google search results is so fierce. Savvy webmasters know that if you're not on the first page, you might as well not be listed, because internet users won't look any deeper than page one, no matter how good or bad those page one results are.
Content isn't king. It's more like something you have to have before you can get down to the business of what it really takes to make your website popular. But keep right on believing content matters. As long as you do, the guys on top will stay on top, and you'll stay comfortably hidden away on the bottom... where they want you.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Twitter is Useless, and Not Because People are Tweeting About Their Lunch
Twitter is a favorite target of the social marketer. Ask any supposed social expert how to get more engaged users, and they'll tell you just to join Twitter and start tweeting. It won't work. Actually Twitter doesn't really work for anything, or do anything. Here's why.
There is only one kind of regular Twitter user. Just one. The only kind of person who uses Twitter is someone who's selling something.
They could just be selling themselves, as in the case of the many celebrities you may have heard are tweeting endlessly there. Some of them are trying to sell their website, drive traffic to it through their tweets. Others are actually selling products. Some are selling political messages. But everyone who actually uses Twitter with any regularity is selling something.
That wouldn't be a problem if there was actually anyone to sell it to, but there are no buyers. @ThatKevinSmith has nearly two million follows, but at least half of them, the most active half, are sellers hoping to suck up to him as a way of getting their own wares sold by extension. The other half are sycophants, who were probably going to buy whatever he was selling anyway, and truthfully only have half-marginally active accounts themselves. They're not exactly tweeting giants.
The thing is, even if there were any buyers on there to make all the selling worthwhile, it wouldn't matter. Follow more than ten people and your twitter feed turns into an overwhelming mess of tweets. You'll never see 90% of the tweets that flow through your feed, unless you're literally checking it every second. No one's doing that.
I know this because I use twitter, regularly. I have a follower count in the six figure range. If I tweet a link, guess how many referrals actually flow from Twitter to my link? I'm lucky if it's more than one hundred. Normally it's probably more like ten.
Or here's a more extreme example. I've had links tweeted by major twitter influencers. People like the aforementioned @ThatKevinSmith and others. Imagine someone with two-million twitter followers tweets your link. You'd expect a least a few hundred thousand conversions wouldn't you? It doesn't happen. Try more like a thousand.
That's what happens when you run a service populated entirely by sellers. For Twitter to matter it also needs buyers, and right now it doesn't have them.
There is only one kind of regular Twitter user. Just one. The only kind of person who uses Twitter is someone who's selling something.
They could just be selling themselves, as in the case of the many celebrities you may have heard are tweeting endlessly there. Some of them are trying to sell their website, drive traffic to it through their tweets. Others are actually selling products. Some are selling political messages. But everyone who actually uses Twitter with any regularity is selling something.
That wouldn't be a problem if there was actually anyone to sell it to, but there are no buyers. @ThatKevinSmith has nearly two million follows, but at least half of them, the most active half, are sellers hoping to suck up to him as a way of getting their own wares sold by extension. The other half are sycophants, who were probably going to buy whatever he was selling anyway, and truthfully only have half-marginally active accounts themselves. They're not exactly tweeting giants.
The thing is, even if there were any buyers on there to make all the selling worthwhile, it wouldn't matter. Follow more than ten people and your twitter feed turns into an overwhelming mess of tweets. You'll never see 90% of the tweets that flow through your feed, unless you're literally checking it every second. No one's doing that.
I know this because I use twitter, regularly. I have a follower count in the six figure range. If I tweet a link, guess how many referrals actually flow from Twitter to my link? I'm lucky if it's more than one hundred. Normally it's probably more like ten.
Or here's a more extreme example. I've had links tweeted by major twitter influencers. People like the aforementioned @ThatKevinSmith and others. Imagine someone with two-million twitter followers tweets your link. You'd expect a least a few hundred thousand conversions wouldn't you? It doesn't happen. Try more like a thousand.
That's what happens when you run a service populated entirely by sellers. For Twitter to matter it also needs buyers, and right now it doesn't have them.
The Truth About Popups, Banner Ads And Other Money-Making Annoyances
Ask anyone, expert or otherwise, about banner ads and what they'll tell you is this: Be careful. Annoy your users with too many of them, and they'll abandon you. Ply them with popups and you'll lose all your traffic. Limit the advertising you use to a bare minimum, because people just can't stand it.
All bullshit.
Throw three simultaneous popups on your site and you'll get one or two complaints, but that's a drop in the bucket if you're a serious content site with millions of people surfing your pages all at once. Sure there's a dedicated group of hippies who run around with the ridiculous notion that no one should be allowed to make money on the internet, but the truth is this: I have never seen anyone's traffic negatively impacted by banner ads.
And let me tell you, I've seen some bad ones.
I've spent nearly a decade experimenting with this on a variety of websites and in a variety of different formats, and I can tell you that people don't care or notice. Use the worst flash animation imaginable, the most annoying popups, the most horrific takeover ads possible... and people will keep right on coming. It won't even cause a dip in your visits in the short term, and in the long term your traffic will probably grow because you'll have more money to invest back into bringing content to your site to draw in more visitors.
So why aren't more sites infested with "click here now for free money" popups? It's not about their users, but their competitors. Overload your site with annoyances and the guy who's trying to steal your traffic will start bragging about how much more "user friendly" his site is. You'll be quickly labeled as greedy and a moneygrubber. Your users may not actually understand what any of that means, but they know it's a bad thing, and the appearance of being user friendly is far more important than the actual act of being so.
Of course, you're probably thinking that not everyone who surfs the internet can possibly be that dumb. That's true, they're not. But, it's the dumb ones you really want. Dumb people keep the internet running. Smart people don't click on banner ads, and if your users don't click on your banner ads, you don't make any money. Only dumb, clueless people click on banner ads. Only your elderly parents who have trouble operating a mouse actually think trying to shoot that animated monkey is really a good idea. And it's from those people that almost every banner-ad driven website you visit makes not some, but all of its money.
More on some of the ways dumb people dominate the internet, in a future post.
All bullshit.
Throw three simultaneous popups on your site and you'll get one or two complaints, but that's a drop in the bucket if you're a serious content site with millions of people surfing your pages all at once. Sure there's a dedicated group of hippies who run around with the ridiculous notion that no one should be allowed to make money on the internet, but the truth is this: I have never seen anyone's traffic negatively impacted by banner ads.
And let me tell you, I've seen some bad ones.
I've spent nearly a decade experimenting with this on a variety of websites and in a variety of different formats, and I can tell you that people don't care or notice. Use the worst flash animation imaginable, the most annoying popups, the most horrific takeover ads possible... and people will keep right on coming. It won't even cause a dip in your visits in the short term, and in the long term your traffic will probably grow because you'll have more money to invest back into bringing content to your site to draw in more visitors.
So why aren't more sites infested with "click here now for free money" popups? It's not about their users, but their competitors. Overload your site with annoyances and the guy who's trying to steal your traffic will start bragging about how much more "user friendly" his site is. You'll be quickly labeled as greedy and a moneygrubber. Your users may not actually understand what any of that means, but they know it's a bad thing, and the appearance of being user friendly is far more important than the actual act of being so.
Of course, you're probably thinking that not everyone who surfs the internet can possibly be that dumb. That's true, they're not. But, it's the dumb ones you really want. Dumb people keep the internet running. Smart people don't click on banner ads, and if your users don't click on your banner ads, you don't make any money. Only dumb, clueless people click on banner ads. Only your elderly parents who have trouble operating a mouse actually think trying to shoot that animated monkey is really a good idea. And it's from those people that almost every banner-ad driven website you visit makes not some, but all of its money.
More on some of the ways dumb people dominate the internet, in a future post.
The Last Honest Blogger
I've been blogging since before there were blogs. Back when we just called it writing stuff on the internet. Once blogs existed, we had a name for it, and that felt pretty good. I've been a volunteer, a freelancer, a writer, an editor, and a webmaster. I've worked for free, I've been paid a pittance, I've blogged for a living for someone else, I've worked for myself, and I've hired others to blog for me. I'm a well known blogger, even now. I've been blogging for longer than some of you have been reading and what I know is this: Nearly everything everyone has ever told you about it is a lie.
Blogs come in all shapes and sizes. There are blogs about everything from finances, to movies, to sports, to being a mommy. I've written for some types, known others who did the ones I didn't, and even when I haven't done it, I've observed closely from afar.
And I can't stand the lies anymore.
Bloggers lie about what they really do, how it really works, the way everything truly happens. Not just to outsiders, or to each other, but sometimes even to themselves. For most bloggers, the moment they start to achieve success is the moment they stop listening to anything anyone has ever told them on the subject, face the facts, and start figuring things out for themselves. The moment you realize everything you've ever read or been told about what it takes to be a successful blogger is false, is the moment you become a successful blogger yourself.
Confused? This blog will help shed light on the subject. Let's start by explaining why everyone lies in the first place. It boils down to two simple reasons.
Why Help The Competition?
Thousands of people start blogs every single day. Every one of those blogs is a potential competitor. Anyone who knows what it takes to make a successful blog is already doing it, and anyone who doesn't already know is a potential competitor waiting to take away your traffic. Many bloggers will pretend to be friends with others, they may even offer to help them out, they may even think they mean it... but there's a line they won't cross. If they really told you how it was done, then by helping you they'd only be hurting themselves.
The Truth Hurts
Beyond the competitive, the truth about blogging success isn't as pretty as it seems. Everyone wants you to believe their blog is popular because they're great writers, because they work harder than everyone else, because they're doing something special and by extension are themselves special. No one wants to admit that's not what's going on, the truth about what's really happening would make them look bad. Some bloggers don't even want to admit it to themselves. Deep down they know how their success really works, but to face it would mean admitting something that they themselves, really just don't want to hear.
If this were another SEO blog or if I had a book to sell, this would be the place where I promise to tell you all the secrets of blogging and tell you that you too can become a success if you just follow what I'm about to tell you.
I won't do that. That too would be a lie. One of those ugly truths is that even if you know exactly what it takes to build a successful web brand based on content, you probably won't be able to do it, and even if you do it, odds are you still won't be able to make any money at it. Or if you do make any money at it, it won't last and you'll eventually be swept aside by some competitor backed by corporate financiers with the SEO power and Google contacts to destroy everything you've been working to build.
But those are topics for another post.
Read this blog. It won't tell you how to become a success, but it will tell you the truth.
Blogs come in all shapes and sizes. There are blogs about everything from finances, to movies, to sports, to being a mommy. I've written for some types, known others who did the ones I didn't, and even when I haven't done it, I've observed closely from afar.
And I can't stand the lies anymore.
Bloggers lie about what they really do, how it really works, the way everything truly happens. Not just to outsiders, or to each other, but sometimes even to themselves. For most bloggers, the moment they start to achieve success is the moment they stop listening to anything anyone has ever told them on the subject, face the facts, and start figuring things out for themselves. The moment you realize everything you've ever read or been told about what it takes to be a successful blogger is false, is the moment you become a successful blogger yourself.
Confused? This blog will help shed light on the subject. Let's start by explaining why everyone lies in the first place. It boils down to two simple reasons.
Why Help The Competition?
Thousands of people start blogs every single day. Every one of those blogs is a potential competitor. Anyone who knows what it takes to make a successful blog is already doing it, and anyone who doesn't already know is a potential competitor waiting to take away your traffic. Many bloggers will pretend to be friends with others, they may even offer to help them out, they may even think they mean it... but there's a line they won't cross. If they really told you how it was done, then by helping you they'd only be hurting themselves.
The Truth Hurts
Beyond the competitive, the truth about blogging success isn't as pretty as it seems. Everyone wants you to believe their blog is popular because they're great writers, because they work harder than everyone else, because they're doing something special and by extension are themselves special. No one wants to admit that's not what's going on, the truth about what's really happening would make them look bad. Some bloggers don't even want to admit it to themselves. Deep down they know how their success really works, but to face it would mean admitting something that they themselves, really just don't want to hear.
If this were another SEO blog or if I had a book to sell, this would be the place where I promise to tell you all the secrets of blogging and tell you that you too can become a success if you just follow what I'm about to tell you.
I won't do that. That too would be a lie. One of those ugly truths is that even if you know exactly what it takes to build a successful web brand based on content, you probably won't be able to do it, and even if you do it, odds are you still won't be able to make any money at it. Or if you do make any money at it, it won't last and you'll eventually be swept aside by some competitor backed by corporate financiers with the SEO power and Google contacts to destroy everything you've been working to build.
But those are topics for another post.
Read this blog. It won't tell you how to become a success, but it will tell you the truth.
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