the business of blogging

I’m no astrologist. I’ve never even done any marketing work for one, or I would know a lot more about the science behind that daily horoscope than I do.  And, even though I do read my horoscope,  I can’t say I usually remember it five minutes later.

But there is a word that intrigued me enough when I first saw it in a horoscope to look it up. The word was “retrograde.” It’s a scientific term referring to the relative motion of two objects. In astrology it’s used to cover the whole period of time that a planet appears to be  moving backwards, away from the earth.  Here’s how the Astrology Weekly dictionary defines its effects:

It is generally considered that a transiting planet is more likely to develop its negative qualities when it is in retrograde. That it is turning back for a recheck of ground already covered need not necessarily be bad, except for the fact that the future is held in abeyance. Some people look upon any delay as a tragedy, but the real difference has to do with whose neck is in the noose when the postponement of execution is decreed. In some cases it may mean only a temporary delay that is compensated for when the planet resumes its direct motion.

Judging by the rising pile of rehashed, recycled, recovered, and reworded junk piling up in my inbox these days, I’d say Internet Marketing has gone retrograde.

I hope your inbox doesn’t look like mine. I deliberately stay on the mailing lists of dozens of people who represent the three or four main schools of Internet Marketing sharks, er, gurus.  That way I stay in touch with what they’re selling these days.  Consider these offerings:

• A high priced, exclusive training course on how to sell search marketing to local businesses - billed a rate higher than most students can expect to make from the activity in a year. I ought to know, I tried to sell local businesses on the idea in 2006. (Hey Rockford, you remember, right?)
• Another chestnut from 2006 is being repackaged for the 2nd time in an attempt to squeeze one more dime out of the product. This time when the market bit at the 5,000 offered, the author got a bit too greedy and offered another 10,000. Last I read he’s still sitting on 2,000 of them. So much for fake scarcity.
• Speaking of chestnuts, there are literally hundreds of things every one of us can do to increase our sales results a little bit here and there. Last time out, these quick fixes were valued at $39. This time they’ll cost you $697.
• Five affiliates of one seller sent me the exact same message touting the templates and scripts for a social networking site so that I could start the “next Facebook.” I got mine when they were the ‘Giveaway of the Day’ 18 months ago.
• One last blooper was actually left in the final edit of the video sales pitch for one of the 3,750,000 products (I googled it) out there that will help you earn more with Twitter. The speaker said he earned $19,000 from Twitter. His interviewer said, “wow. I thought it was $5,000…”

All of these examples are throwbacks to the web 1.0 marketing tactics that we all said were to blame for the rise of web 2.0 “marketing democracy” and socialization. That’s retrograde behavior all right. And it comes at a good time.

When we have 101,000,000 “expert” offerings on how to use a social network that didn’t exist three years ago, the bloom is off the social rose. Even the gurus are “unfollowing,” shedding friends by the thousands and buffering themselves from the mob with Facebook fan pages these days because they admit they can’t stand the noise.

I can’t shake the feeling that the pressure is building faster now. It’s almost like we’re sitting atop the next volcanic explosion of change. Or maybe the planets are just about to swing through that last retrograde angle and appear to snap back into forward motion.

It’s time to move on from here. Time to get out of the schoolyard where everybody cares a little too much about what everybody else thinks and get back to business.

You do what you do best, and I’ll do what I do best and if we need each other’s services we’ll pay for them. I’ll stop pretending to be an astrologist who can predict the future if you’ll stop pretending to be a marketer. Deal?

Posted under social marketing

You may have noticed one thing that sets this blog apart from the majority right away. It wasn’t done as a mistake, though it is something I may change in the future.

Right now, there are no dates to indicate when I’ve posted an item to the blog. I’ve done this to show you how you can use a blog even if you don’t intend to provide a steady stream of new content to your site.

When you set up a blog you gain a lot of functionality on the back-end that makes maintaining your web presence very easy.  Every time you do write something to your site, all you need to do is type it in and hit the publish button. Wordpress programming — with a little help from the plugins we use — takes over to keep things neat and organized from that point on. Here are just some of the things that happen in the background:

• A permanent spot in your directory (or permalink/single post) url is assigned
• The story is published on top of your blog home page as most recent
• Internal links between all posts are established/adjusted
• Backend links are created within categories, page or post types so you can find and edit this post easily
• Navigation links are made, updated and displayed on every page of your blog
• Links between the category you select and the post itself are established
• Any images, video links, podcasts, or other audio links are automatically sorted to the right directories and stored for you
• Links between the post and any image or other asset file are created or adjusted as a the post is moved
• A notation on your sitemap is made and Google is pinged (along with other services)
• Your RSS feed is updated and subscribers notified that you have added content

…and so on and so on. It really is true that the blog you see is only the very tip of the iceberg that is all of your blog. It’a slso true that there can be no magic formula that will tell you when it makes sense for you to set up a static website and when it makes sense to set up a semi-static blog. The choice comes down to how much time or expertise you have to lavish on your website/blog.

Do you have time to go through and complete each of these tasks manually if you post infrequently?  Even if you only made two additions or two deletions to the content of your website each year, chances are good you would overlook one or more of these steps. That’s assuming you worked from a very good checklist that remembered them all for you in the first place. (Ahemm…of course you could also hire me to do it for you…)

On the other hand, dates do help. Human readers love fresh changing content as much as the search engine spiders. They want to see that they’re getting the up to date scoop on all the specials in your retail store, or know that you’re up on the latest judicial rulings relevant to the legal case they may want you to handle for them, etc.

I’m going to continue making entries to this blog without dates for a few months. Of course I’ll be watching my stats closely. It will be interesting to see if traffic to this blog does or doesn’t grow at roughly the rate I’ve come to expect using web 2.0 promotion methods. Benchmarking numbers on this point are the one thing I wasn’t able to find, so we’ll just have to grow some ourselves — along with your comments and observations of course.

Posted under blog building