Karim’s posterous

There's a certain satisfaction in achieving goals, finding success and taking our careers to new heights. It's exciting, it drives us an it massages our egos. It let's us stand back and say 'there, I did this'. But one lesson I'm starting to learn from the top online Gurus is that you need help to reach your potential.

This league of online Gurus, which I affectionately refer to as the Online Marketing Mafia, are experts in their own rights, but they all take the time to promote each other and each other's products and services. At first this might seem illogical because they could be viewed as competitors. They compete for book deals, speaking gigs, twitter followers and blog visitors. But instead of this, they've taken things to the opposite extreme. They go beyond the concept of 'live & let live' by actively reviewing each others books, they post blogs about each other and even hold each other up as examples of online marketing excellence. If a group of people this smart are taking this approach, there's gotta be something we can learn here.

But I'm not a Guru
Forming a group of people who help and learn from each other doesn't have to be limited to Gurus. I think we can find peers in our industry or field who have a take on things different enough from our own to make teaming up interesting. It doesn't have to be a case of setting up joint ventures. But helping each other, and recognising each other's good work is bound to generate greater returns for everyone. Imagine if you owned a piece of land and farmed it alone, you'd most likely be able to create a more plentiful harvest if you and a few other farmers teamed-up and took turns farming each other's plots of land. So how can we take concrete steps to help and be helped?

Be the first to offer a hand
To create a mutually supporting working relationship with your peers, someone will have to take the first step in the right direction. This can be you (or me). If we make that critical first step to go out and praise the good work of our peers, link through to their blogs, re-tweet their Twitter musings, give them testimonials on linked and help them out, we will send a clear message that you're willing to help. The karma-effect then has room to take place and your peers will start helping and supporting you. Now of course you should be helpful if you can to any people you find interesting, but if you focus on forming these mutually beneficial bonds with people in your industry the results can be more impressive.

Forming your Mafia family
Ok so maybe won't wanna go so far as to form an illegal crime syndicate (although that could be fun!). But wouldn't it be good to have a group of really cool people who you respected and shared an industry with to help support you and your projects and accomplishments? After being the first to demonstrate the power of helping out your peers. You'll most likely start to receive some love back. Keep the momentum up, connect on other levels, maybe get a bit more personal on facebook, go out for some food or some drinks. Meet for lunch and brainstorm some ideas. Who knows what you might come up with. The point is that with a bit of socialising, you can solidify this group of mutually respected people into a group of friends that can help and support each other for a overall better experience for all.

This concept isn't so strange, it's the basis for tribes then societies forming, we're stronger together than apart. I do think that in today's world of never ending work commitments and endless distractions, sometimes we forget the importance of forming bonds with people and taking time to nurture these relationships.

Guy Kawasaki recently referred to a very useful post on the importance of writing good content for achieving high search engine (read google) rankings. Some of the tips in the post included writing good titles for your blogs/webpages (which is actually a key weapon in any SEO expert's arsenal). Kawasaki then goes on to state that "Google's in the business of finding good shiitake. You should be in the business of writing good shiitake."

I've always believe that you should write your content for humans and not computers to read, however, the idea that you can be a complete unknown, write great content, and then magically get a lot of traffic and have Google find your 'shiitake' is naive at best. Although I agree that writing great content makes things a lot easier, a heck of a lot of networking, promotion, and consistency is required to generate awareness of your content. Unless you're like Guy who had some major online gurus touting his blog when he started it out, it'll probably take a lot longer for you to get your blog up and running and found by google for any meaningful or useful searches. That is if it's not part of the 95% of blogs started then abandoned.

Also, think about this in the context of a commercial website. You may write the wittiest, most thought provoking content on blank DVDs but that won't be enough by itself to boost your SEO. Without other websites linking to your content, without people referencing it in forums or messageboards, or tweeting it or posting a link to it on Facebook or seeing it in the Youtube, your content will exist in a vaccum. You've got to combine this great content with hard work to get your content out there. Let's face it, the VAST majority of commercial websites are brochure sites with STATIC content that never changes. So how useful is the mantra 'just write it and they will come'?

Apple recently launched a new version of its famous music and media software, iTunes. One interesting addition to this was the ability for people to broadcast the songs or movies they were about to buy on Twitter or Facebook.

This is a good step towards integrating some social media functionality, but it’s only scratching the surface. Considering the huge number of people that actively use iTunes, Apple is sitting on a potential social media goldmine.

The way for Apple achieve success wouldn’t necessarily just be by broadcasting what songs people are listing to on iTunes via Twitter/FB although this would make sense (right now you can only tell the world about things you’re thinking of buying from the iTunes store). What apple really needs to do is create their own social network of iTunes fans on top of their current platform. Here’s a few crucial steps to achieve this.

Step 1 – Promote this new iTunes social network to users via email and/or the iTunes store

Step 2 – Make it easy for people to punch in their email addresses, facebook profiles and Twitter handles to help them find friends using the iTunes social network and invite those that haven’t joined to sign up.

Step 3 – People can see what their iTunes friends are buying/listening to. They can see if people in their network reviewed or rated certain products and should also be able to see if people in their network have bought a certain item they are interested in.

Step 4 – People can make ‘friends’ based on similar musical/movie/audiobook/game/application interests. That’s actually a much stronger basis to make friends with strangers on than just randomly adding people as often happens in Twitter.

Step 5 – Creating this type of network also provides an amazing opportunity for Apple to connect artist with their fans. Image how much more cost effectively gigs and concerts could be marketed through a ready-made iTunes fan base. Also, if this social network enabled sharing of user generated media, concert photos/video etc could be shared through the network too (gotta be careful about copyright issues here of course).

Considering the passion that many Apple fans have for the brand and its products, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get buy in from a hard-core niche of iTunes fans who can then help spread the service out to a wider range of users. This of course maybe something Apple has up its sleeves, in any case it’ll be interesting to see what the next iteration of iTunes brings.

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Orinally posted on KarimGargum.com

I've been reading the http://zenhabits.net blog for a long time. It's an excellent blog, written by a very talented and successful blogger, Leo Babauta. It's full of great tips on productivity, health, time management and personal philosophy. As I said, great blog. Recently I downloaded a free eBook written by Leo with some great tips for building up a solid blog following.

Ok, so far so good, no problem.

Well shortly after I submitted my email to download the eBook. I started getting email after email pitching a paid blogger education program from Leo and some associates.

Here's an example email:

This is a completely different Leo to the one I got to know through the Zen Habits blog. Don't get me wrong, I assumed I'd be getting some additional emails when I handed over my address for the eBook, but I didn't expect an incessant slew of hard-sales pitches for a blogger education system (something that sounds very sketchy in itself).

To be perfectly honest this has left a bad taste in my mouth, I think my perception of Leo and his work has been altered for the worse. I can certainly understand people monetising their work, that's what I do as a marketer, but I think when you have such a precious permission asset built up you have to be extremely careful how you use that. If anything it's a lesson. Leo is certainly not the first blogger I've seen turn all 'boiler room' when they want you to buy their book or sign up for their conference, and I still highly recommend both the ebook and his Zen Habits blog.

There’s great potential both from a usability and commercial perspective, to upgrade and enhance search. If you know the blogs and news sources, facebook friends and Twitter contacts I interact with, why not colour or filter my search results through these lenses. Why does everyone get the exact same search results presented to them? Instead of 15 pages of useless results, let me tell you which blogs I trust and then you can bring me back search results from them only (I won’t read the other ones anyway). What are my friends on Twitter/Facebook saying about the subject I’m looking for? Filtered through these lenses, search results are factors of times more interesting to me, you’ll probably be a lot more successful selling me stuff my peers/friends are buying too so there’s commercial logic in this approach.

It must work. Why else would it persist, a fraction of Spam victims must be generating a sufficient income for the spammers to keep their dark art going. The thing is, the line between spamming and some high-pressure online sales/marketing approaches isn't very thick.

Think about pop-ups, we all say we hate them, and that they annoy us, but they must work. One study suggests that pop-up ads generate a click-through 13 times that of the standard 468 x 60 pixels banner.

What about promotions and sweepstakes? A lot of people consider this type of marketing crude and 'cheap' but it actually works. An online website-building software provider recently doubled the number of users trialing its software with a macbook give-away on Twitter (where it also increased followers by 10,000% in one week).

Asides technological solutions to the problem and potential alternative solutions to spam, we have to face the fact that as long as we're gullable enough to fall for spam and spammy advertising, they will no doubt persist.

I've recently been playing around with FriendFeed, must admit I doin't fully understand how to make the most of it at this stage but I'm not going to give up just yet.

One thing I was thinking though was that the emphasis of so many new tools is on 'sharing' FriendFeed being a perfect example, along with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace. Sharing is a critical component in the success of these services, but I think we're neglecting a key aspect of how we use the internet - to gather information.

Don't get me wrong, it's great to share status updates, photos, locations, videos etc with friends, but I personally spend a lot of time reading news, blogs articles and checking email. The problem is that I go to a lot of different places to pick up this information and RSS feeds and readers, although extremely useful, don't fully meet my needs.

What I envisage is a 'MY FEED' instead of focusing on sharing, think of it as a place to get all your data in 'near' real time. Picture it, your email, Facebook updates, Twitter @ and DMs as well as news, blogs, weather, stock updates that you pick all delivered to you in one secure stream. This reflects how we actually browse the net more accurately, looking for new items, new emails, updated blog posts. Pulling all this data into one chronological stream would be a powerful way to access information online.

I'd be very interested to see if any companies out there are doing this and if not, how feasible it might be.

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