The Nike Swoosh, the McDonald’s arches, the Apple. When you see these logos, instantly you identify the business behind them. You associate all of the feelings, attitudes, and experiences you have with these companies to whatever product carries the logo.
The big companies spend thousands of dollars developing these logos because they are so valuable to their business. Your business probably does not have that sort of budget. But, the Internet has made it easier to find talented artists who can create a custom logo for you at very low prices. No more scavenging for cheap talent at your local art school and hoping they understand your business needs.
Top 5 Reasons to Get a Logo for Your Business
Look Bigger - One of the things that distinguishes big companies from small ones is that the big ones spend more time and energy packaging their business. Their business cards, letterhead, envelopes, and websites all carry a unified look. The foundation of this look is their logo. Use a professional logo to unify the look of your business publications and people will assume you are a big company.
Become More Memorable - A creative logo that truly fits your company will help people identify you. They will ‘read’ the logo and it will jog their memory. A picture is worth 1000 words and a logo is a picture of your company.
Explain Your Name - If your business has an unusual name your logo can help decipher who you are and what you do. A picture of a typewriter next to a name suggests that the person named is a writer.
Distinguish Yourself From Competitors - Are your competitor’s logos dull or confusing? Set yourself apart by creating an exiting logo for yourself. If you are not a professional designer, hire one. Cheap clip art and back design will not lift you above the crowd.
It Is Cheap! - There really is no excuse not to get a logo. There are hundreds of artists available on the web who can make you a fantastic logo for very low prices. Freelance directories, Craig’s List, and online forums are good places to start looking. Several online companies will take care of the hassle and sell you package design deals at very low prices.
Get a high quality professional logo for your company today and start lifting your business above the crowd.
I recently came across a website that promised I could “Get Paid For Blogging!” Who could resist? (I know there are purists out there who claim that blogs should never be tainted by money, but look at the advertising I’ve got planted around here - I’m not one of them. I would enjoy getting paid for my efforts every now and again!)
PayPerPost.com asked people to write about what you would pay someone else to do for you. This question fit nicely with my desire to write about hiring a personal assistant - win/win.
This past spring I did 2 freelance jobs that earned me a couple thousand dollars doing work I enjoy. That’s a pretty nice combo and makes Mrs. Go-To Guy smile. But, weeks and months after the work had been done, I still had not typed up an invoice and billed the clients (Mrs. Go-To Guy was VERY UNHAPPY about that!) I can’t even explain why I was so reluctant to sit down and make an invoice.
Mrs. Go-To Guy is an amazing woman who, rather than beat me up about my shortcomings, prefers to help me discover ways to rise above them. We talked at length about what motivated this behavior and, as best I could figure, it seemed that the interesting part of the work was over and what was left was drudgery. Since I did not need the money desperately (it felt like bonus money) there was less pressure to deal with the paperwork. So, I let it slide. This was not the result I wanted.
Eventually I got the paperwork done and billed my clients. I also started thinking about the value of hiring a part time personal assistant to handle paperwork and clerical duties. There is nothing like someone showing up and asking “what would you like me to do” to get things moving. A few years back I had a summer intern who would be waiting, every day, for an assignment. Because he was there waiting, I found the motivation to plan assignments (and we got a lot of things done!)
This strategy might fit well with my “rock in the stream” idea of content creation. If I have somebody waiting to transcribe the thoughts and notes I dictate into my voice recorder, I will be more motivated to actually record them. The outside influence of a ’staff person’ my be the trick to improving my productivity.
PayPerPost.com told me I would Get Paid For Blogging about what I would pay someone to do for me, and I cranked out this nifty little article.
Do you think this article is horribly skewed because I was paid to write it? Is this any different that writing articles on topics that will attract profitable Adsense ads? Is Roger Ebert’s opinion compromised because movie studios pay to advertise their films in the newspapers and on the television stations that distribute his reviews? Will the Mighty Heros escape the evil clutches of The Shrinker?
And the real question on everyone’s mind… what would you pay someone to do so that you wouldn’t have to do it?
Rapid Keyword
Target the right keywords and get the conversion rates you dream of.
My most recent failure cost me $4.46. I couldn’t be happier. For the price of a Venti Latte at Starbucks I was able to market test a book idea and drop the project before investing major time or money in its development. There just wasn’t enough interest in the product to turn a profit - I discovered this BEFORE I had even written one word.
Market Testing Before Product Development
Have you ever worked for a company that was trying to market solutions in search of a problem? These types of products are usually created by teams of people who brainstorm ideas, pick the one they like best and start creating it. They miss an important step: Finding out if anyone wants or needs their product! Welcome to the realm of market testing.
I’m full of ideas. A lot of them are brilliant - in my mind! Even if I can persuade a few people to agree with me, it’s still a shot in the dark trying to pick a project worth of investing time and money in without market testing.
I do not have a background in product development or marketing - I went to film school! My strengths are coming up with ideas and making stuff. But, I want to create successful projects. I want people to fund my film ideas. I want to be successful, not just busy. The big question, when assessing my book idea, was how to test the concept without going broke or earning a marketing degree first?
Market Testing With Google and a Little PHP
While scouring every book and website I could find on building online busnesses and making money online, I came across an e-book on making money building niche content websites with Adsense ads. It is not an earth shattering subject, the author explained a very practical process for identifying target niches and building sites to draw traffic. In the middle of explaining how the Google Adwords and Adsense programs work he mentioned, as an aside, that running and Adwords campaign would be an excellent and cost effective way to market test an idea! Bells started going off in my head. I made a note to use this idea.
Fast forward a few months and I found myself listening to a 2-part podcast by one of my favorite bloggers, Yaro Starak. The topic was developing and selling e-books for big profits. The guest, Daryl Grant, spoke in great detail about the system that she and her husband were using to develop and market profitable e-books. One of the steps was to conduct a market test using Google Adwords and what she called a ’survey site.’ The familiar sound of bells started ringing!
I examined Daryl’s sample survey site and set about designing a template for testing my own ideas using a similar process.
The Adwords Market Testing Process - 8 Steps to Success
The process itself is very straight forward:
Pick a product concept to test
Create a survey page that promotes your proposed product and has feedback mechanisms
Write several ads for your product idea
Start a new Adwords campaign
Select relevant keywords and set prices
Upload your ads
Run a 3 day test of your ad campaign
Evaluate your results
Picking your product. This is where your personal genius comes in. You have to think of some product (e-books are my initial target) that you think others would want. This is a whole seperate discussion. As an independant filmmaker I thought it would be great to have access to interviews with 10 filmmakers, like me, who had created profitable movies. I’m always interested in these types of interviews in magazines and thought that a book focussed on this topic would interest others. 10 filmmakers spilling all their secrets.
Creating a survey page. The survey page is version 1.0 of what will later become your product’s sale page (if it is successful, that is!) Let people know that the product is not available yet, but sell them on it. Write copy designed to excite them and motivate them to purchase. If you are grammer challenged, get someone to edit your copy for you (if you don’t know any editors, consider a service like OnlineProofReaders.com.) Now, make sure there is a feedback form for them to send you comments and suggestions, and a way for them to join a mailing list to get updates.
The first part is just copywriting and basic web design. The feedback form and email sign-up will require a bit more work. I used a basic HTML form on the survey page with a little Javascript to validate the email address. I then created a second PHP page that processed the form data, sent an email to me with the users name, email, and comments and, if they requested updates, submitted their information to my email list management software.
Now that I’ve created this survey site, I can just tweak the copy for each product I want to test. I’m not much of a programmer, but I got it all setup in about 2 days.
Write ads for your product. Sell your product. Write your ads as though the product is available today. Don’t say you are conducting a test, sell! visitors will find out about the test once they click over to your survey page. You want at least 2 or 3 different ads with slightly different editorial approaches. Adwords will tell you which ads generated the most response, so this is a way to start testing your ad campaign while testing your product. Knowing what people respond to may also help you shape the editorial slant of your product. Here is a sample of two of my ads:
Resist the temptation to just write something fast, but try not to over think things either. If the idea is viable, you will spend a lot of time later optimizing and testing your ads for maximum response rates. The goal here is only to get a fair assesment of the products viability.
Start a new Adwords campaign. If you don’t already have an Adwords account, now is the tie to sign up. It will cost a few dollars to get your account activated. Start a new campaign and follow the prompts to set all of the main parameters. Set the campaign to run for 3 days. This should be enough time to gauge performance. If your test is on the borderline of success, you might extend the test a few more days to get a larger sample of responses. But, remember, the goal is spend only as much as you need to to validate the concept.
Select keywords and prices for your campaign. There are several books on my free e-book page that discuss how to select and test lists of keywords. The Adsense Mint gives an excellent tutorial on the subject (it is focussed on finding high cost keywords for Adsense websites, but the techniques and tools discussed work for this purpose.) Coming up with a good list of keywords will improve your chances of success. You want to identify what topics your potential customers might be searching for and you do not always want to use the obvious approach. Sometimes a group tangential topics will connect with the right people, and cost you less money.
For my campaign I did not just try keywords focussed on things like “filmmaking book” or “interviews with successful filmmakers.” I looked for “film festival listings” and “independant film distribution.” Filmmakers trying to sell a film would be looking for those keywords and might be very interested to read how others found success.
Upload your ads. Enter your ads into your campaign. Google has hard limits to the number of characters per line, so you might have to make some adjustments if you have to much text. Once your ads are in the system, Google will take care of dividing up the visibility of each one.
Run your test. This step is the easiest. There is nothing to do but wait - and repeatedly check your campaign statistics every 5 seconds!!! Try to find something else to distract yourself (am I the only one with this problem?)
Evaluate your results. When your campaign ends, look at the number of clicks you got. Total up the number of email responses you received. Check them against your targets. If you are close, you might want to test a little longer (or wait a few days and conduct a second test.) If you exceeded your numbers, start creating that product now! If you missed, test the next idea and be grateful that you didn’t waste any time creating a product that isn’t profitable. Notice I didn’t say it was a bad idea - just not profitable. It might be the perfect hobby project to work on after you start raking in the money with your profitable projects.
What are good targets? Daryl Grant says that she looks for an overall response of 500 clicks per day. She also looks for 5% of the visitors to be motivated enough to leave feedback or sign up for more information. If you reach or exceed these numbers, you have a winner.
Pay careful attention to how much it costs you to get clicks. You should plan for 1% of your visitors to make a purchase. That means you have to pay for 100 visitors before you find 1 customer. If it costs more reach those 100 people that you expect to earn on each sale, you have a problem. Daryl recommends that your costs for each customer should not exceed 1/3 of the income from your sale. For an e-book selling for $34.95 that means the total marketing cost should not exceed $11.65. Divide that number by 100 clicks and your top cost-per-click comes to $0.11.
$0.11 is not a lot of money, so you need to check your keywords carefully and study the market to determine how much you can charge for your product. You may need to bundle in other items to increase the value of the package and get your income per sale high enough to make the numbers work. Throw in plenty of bonuses too so your customer feels they’ve truly gotten their money’s worth.
Bonus Tip Always try to capture the email address of the people who click through to your sales page. Give them a free taste of your product or offer them a special report in exchange for their email.
Every time you get permission to add someone’s name to your list, you reduce the cost to market to them again. Over time you will have a large collection of people who will grow to trust your advice and recommendations and who you will not have to buy access too.
My Test Results - A Hidden Bonus
My idea is a big dud! I got a dismal response of 25 clicks and 0 comments over the run of my ad. There does not seem to be much pent-up demand for my filmmaker interview book (and I really wanted to do this project!) But, the price of my failure reveals a hidden bonus in this product market testing strategy.
The beauty of the Adwords pay-per-click system is you only pay when people click on your ad - no clicks, no charge! I only had to pay $4.46 to find out that this idea wasn’t going to work. The worse your failure, the less money it costs you. (Conversely, if you spend a lot of money on the test you have got a moneymaking idea on your hands.)
Traditionally, if you took an ad out in a magazine or newspaper it would cost you the same regardless of your results. Joseph Sugerman, direct response genius and author of the book Triggers: 30 Sales Tools you can use to Control the Mind of your Prospect to Motivate, Influence and Persuade, writes about how he used to roll out his ads in regional publications first before buying space in more expensive ones. He would even run 2 or 3 different versions to test refinements in the ad copy. The concept explained here is exactly the same, but much faster and more affordable.
Even if you are planning to market products in the offline world, use this system to run preliminary tests to weed out the lowest performing ideas before you put big money behind them.
I might go back to do some keyword research and see if I can find another angle on this book idea that might test a little better - maybe I should just let it go!
Like me, you may have first seen Farrah Gray being interviewed on the television show 20/20 last week. He is an ambitious, determined, and successful young businessman (he’s just 21 years old!) I found his story and personality inspiring, and within minutes of the broadcast I had logged onto Amazon.com and ordered his book “Reallionaire.”
The book arrived Friday and I’m already half way through it. It is an inspiring tale of his determination and efforts to become a successful entrepreneur. The story is structured around the 9 steps he believes are essential for becoming a success:
Understand the Power of a Name
Never Fear Rejection
Build an All-Star Mentoring Team
Seize Every Opportunity
Go with the Flow… But Know Where You Want to Go
Be Emotionally Prepared to handle Failure
Dedicate Your Time to What You Know
Love Your Customer
Never Underestimate the Power of a Network
Each chapter ends with a simple set of exercises designed to help you focus your own life and work around these principles.
I’ve found Farrah’s story inspiring and challenging. When I read about how he cold-called hotels, cab companies, and shuttle bus services to find people who would help him start his young business people’s group, I realized how much I let my own fears of rejection stop me. I can’t imagine myself, at that age, being that bold. It can be tough now. But, that is why he is a success.
Buy this book! It will inspire you, and the profits couldn’t go to a nicer guy. I look forward to meeting Farrah someday.
Learn Powerful Persuasion Techniques!
Learn ethical and practical persuasion and influence techniques. Don’t force people to listen to you, guide them to understand why they should.
While reading an article on the LifeHacker website about Asking Good Questions, the author quoted a Wikipedia article about the folk story Stone Soup. The quote was a summary of the lessons to be taken from the story and it is a brilliant insight into motivating group participation.
If you want to get people to do something, don’t tell them how desperately they are needed. Don’t try to appeal to their sympathy and kindness. Instead, create the impression that you are giving them the opportunity to be part of your success.
I have seen a number of websites being promoted recently that want visitors to contribute content to them. Interactive collaboration is one of the exciting potential applications of new Internet technology. The problem is that, while most of these sites are trying to generate advertising revenue from the traffic generated by this new content, several high profile sites have no intention of sharing any of the revenue with the content creators. Some even claim complete ownership of materials posted to their sites.
Following the lead of the Stone Soup story, there is a much better chance of success if you invite people to share in your success rather than beg and cajole them into participating. Make sure there is something valuable in it for them, and then make sure they are aware of what you are offering them.
I am working on several projects right now that will benefit from this kind of thinking and I’m grateful for the reminder to focus on inviting others to share the success. My approach to promoting the projects and recruiting helpers will be different.
The Go-To Guy
P.S. My wife wrote a children’s musical based on this story, you’d think I would have already learned this lesson!
Success is a process of planting, tending and growing. It can be discouraging to plug away at tasks that do not show any immediate results. But, if you are patient and continue to cultivate the seeds you plant, they can produce some amazing fruits.
This topic comes up because I have a great example that just happened today which illustrates the point. I want to share it with you.
Pinned to the wall, just off to the right of my office computer monitor, is a resume. It was a resume I didn’t want and was resentful for getting. I was the one stuck responding to it. It is the resume of a person who I now count among my friends.
Back in 2002 I received an envelope from the vice president of my department. In the envelope was the resume and a note saying, “Call this guy. I got his resume from a board member.”
We weren’t hiring. I didn’t have any projects to hire the man for or even any recommendations of others for him to talk with. But this was a request I was not allowed to dismiss. So, after much delay, I called the man in question and arranged a meeting.
From the beginning I was clear that I had no work to offer, but he came anyway. As things turned out, we got along well and had similar ambitions and interests. By the time our meeting was over we were friends, and I began looking for opportunities to work with my new friend and to help him find work. He had hired a ‘free agent.’
Over the next year or two we kept in touch. I had a project that needed his skills, but had no budget - he volunteered two days of his time to help me. I kept his resume pinned to my wall for easy reference.
This past year I’ve had several occasions to recommend my friend for projects and also to hire him for one or two days worth of work. He’s becoming a regular backup person for me and, by extension, is becoming well known and liked by my colleagues. In addition to having his resume pinned to my wall I have his number on my cellphone and his email address in my address book.
Today, I was approached by a colleague who has employed my friend on a couple of occasions. She wants to hire him for a fulltime staff position.
It may have taken almost four years, but that two page resume did its job. The vice president who forwarded it to me doesn’t work here anymore. I can’t say whether the board member who gave it to him is still around. But, my friend may very well end up working in the same office with me.
That seed he planted has taken root and now seems ready to bear some fruit!
It’s not hard to imagine one’s life experiences flowing like a stream. People you meet, conversations you have, flashes of insight, emotions - these things and more wash steadily past. The essence of one’s life is dispersed in this river.
You cannot hold onto a river. Grasp at it and you get nothing more than an empty wet hand that will dry soon enough. But, no matter how clear the water appears, it carries with it artifacts of where it has been. Don’t believe me? Put a rock in the stream and wait.
The rock interrupts the flow. Water swirls around it leaving small pools of calmer water behind the rock. As the water slows, a magical thing happens. Those artifacts become too heavy for the current to carry and they settle to the bottom.
Put a rock in your life and the same thing happens. A house is like a rock in most people’s lives. You settle into one, and in 10 or 20 years, its nooks and crannies become filled with the artifacts of your life. Books, photographes, the car seat you bought for the child you just sent off to college. But rocks can do more than just collect your old stuff.
The Power Of Rocks
I have a wide range of interests. Often, a new momentary passion rises up while I’m exploring another. I also tend to keep coming back to old favorites, but with a new perspective.
The result of my particular pattern of curiosity is that I know a fair amount about a wide range of topics, but never seem to get enough momentum going in any one direction to make much out of it. It is a reality I decided to change.
How can a person like me get enough material together to write a book, create a business, or shoot a movie? My mind and body seem to race along from one thing to the next so quickly that good ideas and best intentions get swept away too soon.
One answer is to begin placing some rocks in my life - carefully placed obstacles designed to slow me down a little and let those good ideas have a chance to settle out of the stream.
Placing The First Stone
This website was created to be a rock. Every week it seems that someone comes to me for some kind of help or advice. It might be damaged drywall needing a repair or, like today, a friend who needed help writing up a quote for a video production project.
When you’ve worked as a house painter, media producer, hotel night auditor, home theater installer, automotive assembly line worker, website designer, director of photographer, carpet cleaner, furniture salesman, building superintendant, set designer, director, and more, the experience builds up. When you add in hobbies, a love of reading, and the random bits of other things that get picked up along the way, it’s no wonder people think I might know something helpful.
In January of 2006, I decided that I would write about my projects, hobbies, and the answers a gave people to the questions they asked. I installed blogging software on my server (another set of skills) and began writing. Now, instead of my advice fading into silence after the words are spoke, I slow down and let them settle onto this website.
So far I’ve written more than 56 posts. The majority are longer pieces, like this one. Printed out at the font sizes and page dimensions of a typical book, that amounts to more than 100 pages. That is a success by my accounting.
Adding More Rocks To My Stream
Just creating the blog site was not enough. I needed a few other rocks placed around me to ensure that I would generate the habits required to easily capture the bits of knowledge and experience I wanted to write about. I bought a small audio recorder to carry with me so I can dictate notes when I’m working on something worth writing about. I’ve also begun carrying notebooks and a camera.
Each one of these things causes tiny pieces of my experiences to settle into a growing mound of resources that I can use and share. It is exciting to see how people from all over the world have found my article on bookbinding. It is even more exciting that people are starting to ask me questions through my website. The very fact of this website’s existence is helping to inspire new articles and connect me to new people and opportunities.
Try putting a few rocks in your stream. Who knows, you may just have a book in you, or the idea for then next big business breakthrough. Whatever it is, you will find great satisfaction in being able to share it with other people.
Is this the new model for creative work? Yahoo invites users to create ads for them. There are no prizes or awards available, but they are hoping to get some great creative content. Please, if you have an ounce of talent, don’t submit anything.
It seems like a lot of new web services are popping up with a business model that consists of:
1. Build an online repository for content
2. Get people to fill it full of creative original content and promote it to all their friends
3. Build an advertising business around the visitor traffic
4. Keep all the money!!!
Item 4 is the one that makes me uneasy. It’s one thing to outsource work to qualified people in countries with a lower cost/standard of living, it’s quite another to just assume you don’t have to pay at all. This business model counts on creative people making a living some other way and producing content at their own expense. It also devalues similar creative work and makes it harder for everyone to make a living - it makes everyone who participates into a hobbiest.
I hope the trend is short lived. In the world of video, it probably will be. Cameras and editing software may be cheap, but it still takes a lot of work to get together a crew and cast to make a video. Not too many folks will do that for free very long. It may be a different story for writers, graphic artists, etc.
Do you want to help shorten the lifespan of these businesses? Then don’t send content to anyone who doesn’t offer you something of value if you earn money for them. It could be a per-use fee, advertising credits for your business, access to useful content or tools to help you with your work - it could be anything. But, they should be willing to acknowledge that your work has value and offer you something.
If creative people, who want to earn a living with their talents, only contribute to websites that recognize the value of their work, it won’t be long before the business practices change. Or, these types of websites will become flooded with low quality work by kids - sometimes interesting, but not reliable in my experience.
I recently wrote about a podcast I had heard that discussed a method for developing and selling e-books. This was not the ‘download my e-book, rebrand it, and sell it’ get rich quick approach. They focussed on identifying potential products, evaluating the potential market, market testing, and then producing and selling. It is a very systematic process.
Product evaluation and market testing has been high on my mind since I heard that podcast, so I started doing some research on the subject. I found a few very interesting resources. Links to them are at the end of this article.
They also have a free newsletter and magazine. I signed up for both on the basis of these two articles - they were both features in an earlier edition of the magazine.
The other resources I found were mostly from college course materials posted online. Some deal with traditional physical product design and some with the conceptual framework for doing analysis. They all looked interesting to me and I plan to go back and spend more time studying them. They are:
If you know of other resources for devising a method of evaluating the profitability of a potential new product, let me know. I will be testing a few ideas for online information products soon and will be writing about the different methods I used.
The Go-To Guy
When was the last time you had to join a new group? Maybe you started a new job or school. Maybe you joined a club or church. If you are anything like me, the process of getting to know people probably went something like this:
You showed up and talked with a small number of people at first - the boss, a greeter, the person sitting next to you. You talked about common interests and started the process of getting to know more about each other. At the same time, you started to listen to what the people around you were talking about. You gravitated toward the people you found interesting and eventually found an opportunity to contribute to the group conversations.
As people got to know more about you, they began to see the unique insights, experiences, and skills you had to offer and started to come to you with questions. Eventually, people started to refer others to you because they thought you could help them.
Over time you became an established part of the group with a history of involvement and a level of respect earned by the quality of that involvement.
This is a very common path to establishing yourself in a community. It is also an excellent process to model for generating website traffic on the Internet. The Internet is really just a great big community and you have to establish yourself there just like anywhere else.
So, How Do You Establish Yourself On The Internet?
The short answer - Join the Conversation! Seek out the places and people who are talking about things that interest you. Over time you will learn who the trusted voices are and discover where they hang out. When you feel like you have something to say that will add to the discussion, make comments. Blogs, user forums, and newsgroups are designed to encourage this. When you add value to the conversation, people will want to know more about you and what else you have to say.
Make sure people can find you. Whenever allowed, include a link back to your website or blog so that people can find you. Then, make sure you have good stuff waiting for them when they do.
Impress people with the quality of your comments and they will come find you. Impress them with what they find and they will bookmark your site or feed. Eventually, they will start recommending you to others.
Before you know it, a community will develop around your conversations.
How Powerful Is This Approach?
I will give you one quick example to show you the power of joining the conversation. On June 20, 2006 (3 days ago as I’m writing this) I left a short comment on an interesting article at Brad Isaac’s website. The article is called Work for Yourself First. I felt that my experiences with the subject were relevant and that others might find them interesting. Read the article and see what I had to say in response (it’s also a great article - so read it for that reason too!)
I was a little surprised today when I checked my site’s traffic stats and discovered that 21 people had already visited by following the link to homepage that is included in the comment. They came from all around the world. That is more traffic referrals than from any other single source over the same 3 days. And, these visitors also spent more time exploring my site and reading my articles than most others.
The same thing happens when you include trackback links to relevant articles in your own blog posts. An exerpt from your article will show up as a comment attached to the article you are referencing. This comment will link back to your blog entry. As you add to the conversation the community grows around it. It is powerful stuff.
Don’t Pee in the Pool
Before you run out and start flooding the Internet with comments, remember that your reputation is at stake.
Do not post scores of ‘me too’ comments, or worse, irrelevant comments intended only to get a link back to your site (this heinous practice is called comment spamming. Many website resources have been created whose sole task is weeding this junk out and throwing it away.) You will not get traffic to your site if you are known as a ‘comment spammer.’ What you are likely to get are piles of angry comments on your own site from people who are upset about what you are doing.
Another downside to comment spam is that it fills the Internet with so much garbage that nobody wants to wade through it to find the good stuff. The people who create good content must spend their time taking out the trash and are not generating new content.
Once somebody pees in the pool, nobody wants to go swimming and somebody has to clean it up!
Go Out and Join the Conversation
Go, be sociable. Talk to others and add your insights to the conversation. Build your reputation on the Internet and before long, people will come looking for you. The traffic you get will not be subject to the whims of any search engine’s latest algorithms, and the visitors you get will be more likely to become regulars.
It’s not hard to imagine one’s life experiences flowing like a stream. People you meet, conversations you have, flashes of insight, emotions - these things and more wash steadily past. The essence of one’s life is dispersed in this river.
