How To Be Wildly Successful And Get Everyone To Like You
There’s drama in the blogosphere, people. Like James Chartrand smells the chance to shill all the way from icy Quebec, I can smell drama, and baby, I want me some.
For those of you who don’t read every metablogging blog or post in the known universe, I’ll introduce the key players:
Maki is a Canadian marketing dude (no, he’s not me) whose blog is about ‘’Helping you make money online.’’ He writes really good long-ass posts and is the Mac Daddy of social media. He was the first one to Stumble and Sphinn one of my posts and I can honestly say that’s what got my traffic started.
Yaro Starak is a serial entrepreneur extraordinaire who has successfully run a bazillion businesses, and whose blog is “aimed at those interested in Internet business and Blogging.’’ He is the founder of Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program, a pretty cool program for, uh, bloggers. He’s also extremely cute, although for many of you that will not be relevant to this article.
What happened?
Maki recently wrote a post saying that his subscribers had passed the 10,000 mark, and explaining all the traditional How To Make Your Blog Successful rules he broke in the act of getting there. This includes no public feedcount as social proof of him being cool, no guest posting, no contests or group projects, no advertising, no incentives like ebooks, no Digg frontpages, and infrequent posting. Basically he did nothing the gurus said he should, and he’s kicking ass anyway.
Yaro, on the other hand, is one of those gurus, and he’s making a good deal of money teaching people how to follow the aforementioned rules in order to succeed. Many of his readers, customers, and potential customers are also Maki’s readers, and a revelation of this sort could be fairly damaging to Yaro’s business as every yahoo with an internet connection could start thinking, ‘’Well, hell. If Maki can do it…’’.
Yaro published a post, basically expressing that Maki is successful not because of what he did (or didn’t do) but in spite of it. (He actually didn’t say it like that, Terry Heath, one of his commentators did. While we’re talking Terry, you seriously should go read his parable on the emperor and the blog.) Here’s an excerpt of what Yaro had to say:
“Maki has talent…
Basically, he has pretty much bucked the trend and not done anything I recommend in Blog Mastermind or countless other bloggers suggest as good practice to grow a successful blog (things even Maki recommends to other bloggers)…
You see, Maki is an anomaly.”
Intelligent discussions and opinions ensue, most of which on the topic of whether or not you need talent to succeed in blogging, or anything else for that matter. Since I know you’re breathless with anticipation, here’s my take:
You don’t need talent in your home business. You need spin.
Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that I wanted to make my blog grow without using traditional blog marketing methods. Let’s also say that my blog wasn’t half bad. I go out there and read everything there is to be read, finding top notch content from talented new bloggers, or bloggers who were experienced but not getting a lot of traffic. I then Stumble those posts, bringing new traffic to their sites at a level they’ve never before experienced. For the ones in the marketing niche, I Sphinn their stuff.
They become a lot more popular than they were before I “discovered” them. Do you think they might be grateful? Do you think they might come to my site and read it? Do you think they’d like to be my friend and tell all their other friends that they should be reading my blog? Let’s investigate, shall we?
There’s a show here in Canada called The Red Green Show. It is hosted by a character named, you guessed it, Red Green. He’s an older gentleman who favors flannel shirts and suspenders and is basically a very pleasant hick whose solution to most problems is duct tape. (He is so pro-duct tape that 3M is the show’s main sponsor.) To non-jingoistic Canadians, he is the epitome of everything that is wrong with our country. He repeats his favorite tagline at the end of every show:
“If women don’t find you handsome, at least they should find you handy.”
Red is one handy dude. This is his spin, or as some snarky marketers might refer to it, his USP. When Red’s picking up the ladies, that’s his angle. He doesn’t have to look like George Clooney and he doesn’t have to be a tiger in the sack. The ladies will forgive him his weaknesses because he’s a demon with duct tape and he never met a busted anything he can’t fix.
Channel your inner Red Green.
Find your home business spin. Find your USP. Find out what makes you cooler than the other cats. Do you need talent to be a successful blogger, business person, artist? Yes, but talent has pretty broad definitions.
Skellie is honest and gentle and informed and nice. That’s her way of being talented.
Michael Brito is also honest, although in a far, far different way. That’s his way.
I am a clumsy alcoholic pottymouth and frequently make people spit out their gin, sputtering, “I can’t believe she just said that in public!” That’s my way.
I do not believe that Maki is an anomaly.
I believe his talent lies in what he does, just like you have talents and I have talents and your cat has talents. Our talents are not the same as Maki’s talents, so we are unlikely to be as successful as he is in what he does. That’s not to say we can’t have successful blogs. We just might not have successful Make Money Online blogs.
Find your spin, make your millions. Rinse. Repeat, if desired.
Click here to subscribe to IttyBiz. Then I can write a post about how I got 10,000 subscribers and people can talk about me on their blogs and the cycle will continue in perpetuity. I will buy lots of Kate Spade handbags and dine at the Ritz.
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Next Post: When Fine Is Plenty
My inner Red Green is decided. Figuring it out is a non-issue for me. And I quote:
“We have decided that James does whatever it is the people around him are not doing. For example, if everybody else is being nice and reasonable, James throws down the gauntlet and talks smack. If everybody else is snarkin’, only then will he make peace. It’s what makes him complex and unique. :-)”
Fits me well ;) And thank you for reminding me that I have to buy more duct tape. (Excellent for crafts with small children, thumb guards for carving so you can actually keep all your digits in one piece, and barring icy wind entry from a crack in the door to cut my heating bills down)
Oh my God, dude. You ARE Red Green! The father of my illegitimate love child is a CBC TV star! I have to go call my mom.
Here is the sweet, sweet irony of Maki’s success: he is not an anomaly.
He succeeded by proving the rules, not breaking them. I like Yaro a lot, he has written a lot of seriously informative material. But he’s a little too uncomfortably close to internet-marketing sleazebag territory.
And the mindset of the people who fall for that dreck is that they want the magic formula for success, and they’ll keep buying one system after another until they go broke.
The gray area between the black hat and the white hat stuff is littered with the corpses of the dead who “followed the rules” for one simple reason: followers don’t succeed. Leaders succeed. And leaders break rules.
But even so, I still maintain that Maki, in fact, proves the rules. But not all those petty little formulaic rules about this or that. He proves much bigger rules:
Content is king.
It’s who you know.
If you read the comments at Yaro’s blog, Maki says all he did was write great stuff and build his network using social media.
Wow. I wanted to write posts that would get quoted but I never thought I’d see one of my comments featured somewhere! The web is an amazing place, but I have the suspicion it’s all held together somewhere with duct tape.
@ Michael - Can’t you just say something stupid in my comments for once? Something really lame? I’m getting sick of this whole contribute-to-the-conversation thing you’ve got going on. Seriously, though, one of the most striking points Yaro makes in his post is this one:
“I like to think that any person who is diligent can build a successful blog regardless of talent.”
I wonder if that’s good for the blogosphere. Only time will tell, I guess.
@ Terry - Hi! Welcome to IttyBiz. Loved the emperor thing. I think you’ll find that the web is actually a series of tubes that’s held together by duct tape. Unlike Canada, the internet cannot thrive on duct tape alone. Ooh. I like that. It could be my new tagline:
The internet. Not just a series of tubes anymore.
Oh, you think YOU’RE tired of it? Can you imagine the pressure I’m under? No. No, you can’t.
One of these days I’m probably just gonna snap and flame somebody to a scorched and smoking greasy black smear.
@ Michael - I have some recommendations, if you’re interested. :-)
Um, Naomi? I’d like to complain about Michael’s comment. He completely stole my “magic formula” comment out of my brain and then had the unmitigated gall to make it sound a zillion times smarter. Curse you, Mr. Martine!
@ Sally - Totally reasonable complaint. I’ll forward your comments to the board of directors.
Well, I for one kind of like Michael’s intelligent conversation. I just wish he’d curse more. Then he’d be sort of like the male version of Naomi, and I’d get double the entertainment.
I’ve only recently started reading Yaro’s stuff. I have to say it tends to sound very much like that long copy sales stuff that makes me shudder. Underneath it is good information, I think, but… I dunno, something’s missing under the greasy, tacky, salesy push. (Why can’t people just be people, by the way? That annoys me. Quit pushing.)
Maki, who I did not know was Canadian and now must him support even more, writes content that makes me think. It’s helpful first, it’s quietly “do this” but it’s also got a little bit of “don’t you think?” tossed in and it’s all presented in a way that makes me say, “Hm. I have to think about this more.”
I don’t think Maki’s an anomaly. I think *both* these people got lucky because they came online at the right place in the right time, as did many other highly successful people on the Internet today. There will be less and less success stories as the Internet grows simply because there will be less chance for the little guy out of left field to become a success.
Which is why I’m making a hell of a break for it now.
The only problem with Maki is that his posts are so long that I usually can’t finish them in one sitting. Then I get distracted and I forget to go back and read. Oh, and he does that “big-ass-image-in-the-middle” thing, which drives me bananas. One big-ass picture is enough people.
@ Michael - He didn’t prove all the rules; he handpicked which he’d prove. Yaro is going for the “formula” version of success proven to work as well - for certain people in the right time and the right place, I think.
The Internet is just a game of Russian roulette.
Nice to see the conversation continued here by you Naomi.
I think another point to consider is purpose. Every time you make an assessment of one person’s method against another’s you are usually comparing them based on your view of success. I’m pretty certain what Maki wants out of blogging is different to what I want and again different for every person who left a comment on this post.
I noticed some people don’t like that I “sound” like an Internet marketer sometimes. That’s a fair call, because I do sell from my blog and I use Internet marketing techniques to do so. If you are not interested in what I sell then you probably hate being sold too, it’s the natural reaction and we all know what it feels like - it happens every time you read a sales page when you don’t want the product on offer.
Maki on the other hand does not try to sell (much) from his blog. His purpose and drive, at this time, is not focused on that, though I know he is happy to make money from what he does - he wouldn’t take sponsors and promote the odd affiliate product now and then otherwise.
All of this is subjective to the reader’s perception anyway - just like this comment I am making now is.
The key is to find an audience that helps you meet YOUR goals, which usually involves you helping them meet THEIR goals. That’s something both Maki and myself can lay claim to achieving because we have the audience to prove it.
Yaro
@ Yaro - Yes, that’s very true. Your content is written and presented in a certain way because of your interest to sell. Nothing wrong with that at all, actually, and you do it very well. Your success reflects that, I think. It’s not for me, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It does mean that I won’t pay as much attention to what you have to say because I do feel turned off as I begin to read. I absorb less of what you might offer me because I feel the push.
Keep in mind as well that internet marketing techniques do not have to be pushy or salesy. There are many ways of marketing and the implication that the methods you use are the one and only method isn’t really accurate.
I agree with what you’re stating, though: that both you and Maki became successful because you met the needs of your target audience. Be it by chance or by applied technique, that’s ultimately what happened.
Maki did have a lot of affiliate links earlier on, but he took all the sales feel out of it by doing a great job presenting it as objective information.
There’s a lot to be said for learning by observing. I had once subscribed to just about every big IM sleazebag newsletter there was — just so I could see them all at once, like bacteria in a petri dish. I learned a lot by comparing them all to each other (and laughed when they fell over each other all promoting the same bullshit system). I’ve unsubscribed from them, now, and I feel much cleaner and better about myself.
At least with Yaro I always feel like the offers and exchanges are fair. I happily gave him my email address for his Blog Profits Blueprint ebook. I got a lot of value out of that book — it confirmed a lot of what I already knew and I learned a thing or two. I can see how others might then also be persuaded into the Blog Mastermind membership program.
I know that Yaro and his team worked like madmen to create a lot of solid, beneficial content and services for Blog Mastermind. A lot of people got real value from that program. I don’t think I would have, being more advanced, but also I’ve taken a different route: selling professional consulting services.
Maki does indeed have talent, but then again, that proves a rule: talent rules. Yaro proves a different rule: hard work and application of proven techniques works. Neither rule cancels out the other.
BTW, I’m not suggesting Yaro has no talent, but even he said Maki has the kind of talent that he called it an anomaly.
[...] a quick recommendation for “The Emperor’s New Blog” on IttyBiz in her post “How to be Wildly Successful and Get Everyone to Like You” (after she had cited a comment I made on Entrepreneur’s Journey). This leads me to [...]
Ayup.
I’m getting very sick of all the “Increase your RSS subscribers with these 10 sure fire tricks!” posts.
Concentrate on your content. Do what you do. Repeat.
Hi Naomi - I’ve subscribed. I found you through Maki stumbling you. I was confused at first. I saw the picture of that old guy and I’d not heard of a man being called Naomi before.
I’ll be honest - I avoided Maki’s blog at first. I thought it was going to be one of the usual make money online by signing up to this, that and the other in every post. And I’m ashamed to say that I thought he was a school kid because of the cute pictures.
I think what makes Maki stand out is that he gives first - which is important in business. And he stumbles the posts of people like you and me - not just the people who have loads of traffic.
When he first stumbled me, I didn’t know what had happened - in fact I still don’t really understand stumble upon properly.
But, aside from that - he writes brilliant well researched posts and they attract people back to his blog.
[...] “The Emperor’s New Blog - A Tale of Social Proof” on IttyBiz in her post “How to be Wildly Successful and Get Everyone to Like You” (after she had cited a comment I made on Entrepreneur’s Journey). This leads me to [...]
@ Yaro - “If you are not interested in what I sell then you probably hate being sold” - I think that’s where a lot of complaints come from, and they’re complaints with flawed bases. I notice a lot of people with knowledge in an area (like blogging) taking issue with others teaching and charging for information that they themselves already know.
If I’m an expert hockey player, it’s pretty ridiculous for me to get angry at someone else coaching beginner’s hockey just because I already know the game. If I don’t want it, I won’t buy it — nobody’s making me. If Blog Mastermind was still around I’d probably sign up if only for the fact that I loved the Blog Profits Blueprint — and people pay me to market their blogs for them!
Thanks for stopping by, Yaro… it’s great to have you.
@ Catherine - Welcome, and thanks for subscribing. It’s nice to meet you. Yeah, the anime is a brand I didn’t — and still don’t — get, but funnily enough, when I see anime now, I think of Maki. That’s some nifty branding.
[...] post is a bit of a departure. I’m getting a bit introspective today because of what Naomi talked about recently. In short, her take is in order to be successful at blogging, you need to [...]
I don’t think Maki got successful by being talented, I think he got successful by working his ass off. He’s done an intimidating amount of research to figure out the stuff he writes about, and he puts a lot of hours into his blog and the ideas behind it.
I think Yaro makes a very good point that his goals (and his readers’ goals) are very different from Maki’s.
Yaro and Maki both got successful by being wildly useful, each to different markets. (Although I’m sure there’s overlap.)
Also they both have cool names. Perhaps they are twins separated at birth?
Naomi - you are so awesome and such a fabulous writer! What a great post! I am stumbling it. :-)
@ Sonia - Perhaps they are the same person? Maybe it’s, like, code and shit.
@ Aruni - Thanks, sweetie. I like stumbles!
Hi Naomi,
Firstly, thank you so much for checking out my blog and commenting (on Legos!).
I just want to say this post just shows how OPEN the blogosphere can be. To devote an entire post about another blogger is just fascinating to me. Think about it.
Would Jay Leno do a segment featuring David Letterman? (Maybe he has but) I don’t think so.
Would a presidential candidate talk about the positives of his/her opponent? Um, nope.
But here, you get all that, plus some choice four-letter words that won’t get bleeped out by the network, or edited by your speech writer.
Great stuff.
[...] stumbled across a post about two Internet marketing blogs at IttyBiz regarding two bloggers who live at doshdosh, Maki and Entrepreneurs Journey, [...]
I know Maki’s formula to success:
1) Create extraordinary content.
2) Use social media to find audience.
Though, as Simone put it, both of these steps require you to work your ass off. :)