Social Media

Why I’m opting out of the content race.

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Leaving the raceI don’t like doing things just because I’m told to do them. Or when I’m told I have to do them.

And recently I’m feeling a little pressured to keep adding new posts to this site on an increasingly frequent basis.

Where is this pressure coming from?

It’s coming from the web itself.

Both the search engines and social media favor content that is new and fresh. (How often do you check last week’s tweets or last month’s Facebook updates?)

Also, readers seem to favor content that is fresh and new. There is an assumption that posts and articles that are new are somehow better and more valuable than content that was published last week, a month ago or even a year ago.

More and more the web is about what’s happening right now.

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Social media marketing and the mad electrician.

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social media marketerSocial media is not something you just add on to your existing marketing plan.

It won’t work if you say, “Hey, last quarter we tried coupons, this month let’s try social media.” It’s not an advertising medium.

If you want social media to really work, you have to pull apart your whole marketing plan, and your company culture, and rebuild everything with “social” at its heart.

I have worked with a couple of different companies over the last little while, both of them in the B2C space, both of them in their first year of business. But they have had very different levels of success with social media.

The first company built its company and its marketing plan along traditional lines. Old school marketing. And then they decided to give social media a try. They just bolted it on.

It didn’t work.

The second company was more of a “native” web business. Its founders were younger and had grown up with the web. This business had “social” at its core. Everything – from sales, to customer service, and to marketing – revolved around social media. In fact, even the way people communicated within the company took place on a social platform.

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Don’t make money for Facebook. Make it for yourself.

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Mark Zuckerberg has enough moneyHow much time in total have you spent writing posts and updates for your social media accounts? Dozens of hours? Hundreds even?

Do you create updates for Facebook? Posts for Google+? Videos for YouTube? Tweets for Twitter?

If you do, you’re a content creator.

And the content you create is making the owners of these social media sites rich. Massively rich.

Unless you have a particular passion for making other people rich, allow me to suggest an alternative.

Instead of investing your time and passion in writing content for social media sites, invest it in writing content for a website of your own.

No, I’m not suggesting you abandon social media.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is to show you what I do myself.

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The fastest way to master the craft of writing for the web is to create and write your own website.

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My money making website about coffeeIt’s hard to track all the different ways in which I have built up my knowledge and expertise in writing for the web.

I guess it started when I wrote and published my first website back in 1996.

When I began writing for the web full time in 1998, I was soaking up new knowledge from all kinds of different sources. I would read articles, buy books and listen carefully to fellow presenters at industry conferences.

And, of course, I learned a great deal from every new client project I took on.

But nothing compares, or even comes close to the knowledge I have gained from writing and publishing my own hobby website, CoffeeDetective.com.

Yes, it’s a hobby. I work on the site just in the evening and at weekends. Sometimes.

And before I get into the part about learning, let me just mention that the site has also become a significant source of income for me and my family. Since I began writing it in 2007, this hobby-site has earned me over $200,000 in passive income.

Now let’s look at how my coffee site has helped me learn so much about writing for the web.

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The biggest threat to quality content is…social media.

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Content marketing crashThere is a huge crash coming.

Racing down the highway, approaching from opposite directions, are content marketing and social media marketing.

Many people think these two vehicles are complementary, one supporting the other, driving in the same direction. And potentially they could be. But that’s not what I see happening.

I think they are about to collide and cause a lot of companies some huge headaches.

Here is what I’m seeing…

With their Panda update Google bankrupted a ton of companies and forced the rest of us to focus more on the quality of the content we published, and less on the quantity.

For the last couple of years we have all been focused on creating quality content. At least, we have if we want Google to be nice to us and list our pages high up in the search results.

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How I would pitch my social media services to prospective clients.

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social media fire hydrantI don’t offer professional social media services.

But if I were at a different stage in my career, I would. In fact, I would be all over social media.

Why? Because every successful freelancer fills a need on the client side. If you want to be a highly paid freelancer, you need to offer a service and skill set that companies desperately need. And right now I see millions of companies that desperately need help with social media.

Putting aside the tiny percentage of companies that are being really smart and successful with their social media marketing, I would address the other, much larger group.

These are the business people who feel like they are trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Information about social media and how they should use it is hitting them from every direction at an impossible speed. They feel battered and confused.

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