You didn’t realize you were at war, did you?
Oh, but you are.
In fact, you’re fighting battles on four fronts simultaneously.
Posts categorized as Traffic
The advertising world is obsessed with “eyeballs.” If you want to sell ads on your blog, for example, you’ll have to show potential advertisers how many unique users are coming to the site each week–how many eyeballs are looking at your stuff.
But readers are made of more than eyeballs. If you want to get beyond advertising to where the real money is, and find your village of profitable customers, you’ll need to get beyond simplistic eyeball thinking and start addressing whole human beings.
Authenticity.
It’s the new catch-word in online marketing, whether in corporate circles or among the entrepreneurs who can make the most of it.
But what does it mean?
Let’s cut our losses and forget the clueless corporate crowd. It’s much more interesting to focus on the micro-businesses that are cropping up everywhere (with more coming due to the blessing-in-disguise layoffs this recession is fueling).
Many well-intended souls are all about authenticity. After all, this means you don’t have to care about that phony marketing and sales stuff… you know, like understanding human psychology and engaging human emotion.
How’s that working out for you?
Seth Godin needs no introduction to this crowd. And there’s a good chance many of you already have a copy of his latest book, Tribes.
If not, Tribes is all about leadership in a post-geography world. The Internet allows anyone to become a leader of a tribe big or small, with members from across the planet. And people want you to lead them in all sorts of contexts.
There’s a great divide in the online marketing world at the moment.
On one side is the Tribe of the Cool Kids. They’re part of The Conversation. They use the niftiest open-source tools. They have trendy haircuts. They’re about voice and influence and attention.
Hype has many guises or nuances. Unfortunately, today, hype has become an indiscriminate catch-all-phrase for any type of copy that anyone objects to, for whatever reason.
Well, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is hype.
And so, for ease of understanding and with a bow to those who either adore or loathe hype–I will divide hype into two broad categories:
Hype that always converts and hype that rarely will.
