Establishing Yourself on the Web

About Leaders, Followers, and other Minion

On the web, people tend to elect leaders just like they do in the real world. Most people don't like to think, and most ideas are not very original. Often, the first person in any space, or the first person to coin a new word, gets to own that market space and build upon it a brand that is hard to beat. As time passes, people join these market spaces and they become more competitive. This is what drives content quality, the ad networks, and the internet economy. And it happens much faster than in the real world. For example, when I created my site, Overture showed zero search volume for "SEO Book", and now the term goes for over a dollar a click on Overture and AdWords.

Getting Published

From what I have seen, the single biggest factor for success on the web is syndication. I had a friend (who was far more popular than I was) get denied the opportunity to write articles for some sites based on the fact that people did not know him.  Even though those sites were topical publishing sites, and even though his articles were very good, they didn't even care to look at his work before telling him that they were not interested. People won't usually give your quality content a chance unless you build a reputation first. The articles I write now probably are not that much different than what I would have typed a year or so ago. The biggest difference is that I have tried hard to build a reputation.

Learning, Posting, and Building Your Brand

I have had the opportunity to meet or talk to guys like JasonD, LittleMan, NFFC, and DaveN.  I recognize that on the technical front there may be  guys out there that know more than me. While stating random forum names may sound weird, the forum names people use can actually become a large part of their brand. Most of the names listed above are people who got into SEO years before I even knew what a search engine was. I also think most of them were well known in large part because of their contributions to the WebmasterWorld forum. I did not spend much time trying to build brand by posting in the largest forums or networks, though, because the noise was so overwhelming, and there was so much information, that I would have had little chance to succeed.

Starting From Scratch

When you first start out you have to work way harder than others just to barely get by. Starting out from scratch, though, may make you more efficient in the long run, since you cannot afford as much fat in your system as the established businesses can. When starting anew, it is easier to do well in a few smaller markets than it is to try to dominate a larger one. It is also easier to get noticed by participating in small communities and networks. You can become a regular contributor to a few blogs and forums to help build your brand, without the full level of investment or commitment that larger sites would require just to get noticed. Additionally, this helps you learn things at a slower pace, which makes information easier to digest.

Finding Your Niche

The competition in some markets is so high that if you are not exceptionally creative or technologically gifted you will have to work an insane amount of hours to do well (that's what I did). Either that, or to approach your topic from a unique angle. For example, few people push Search Engine Optimization from a social angle, even though the web is a huge social network (to worry excessively about machines that aim to emulate users, and forget about the web users themselves, seems to me a bit absurd).

The trick is to somehow find a way to offer people a greater "signal to noise ratio" than other sites, or create a system which enables them to do that. Google did it, Slashdot did it, etc. We can emulate the actions of these large organizations on a personal level. You can do that by consuming vast amounts of data and creating systems that intelligently reorganize it for others. The trick is to add something to it. If you are unsure of where you can or should start, you can go to a local community on a topic (or a few related topics) and look at common recurring problems. Then, create more elegant or better answers to those problems than they currently provide.

About Links, Popularity, and Becoming Successful

Links are just citations. Being original, funny, useful, or different helps to build them. Saving people time or creating value builds a huge amount of links. Off the start, you will have to work harder than the leaders in your field but, in the end, there is not much difference between what you have to do to make $10,000 or $100,000 a year on the web. The beauty of it is that when you get lots of support from within your community, the 'echo chamber' of people outside of your community will also find you and will help market you free of charge. If you read, learn and write, enough market opportunities will find you. If you spend a thousand hours saving a million people an hour each, there is probably a way to build a business model around that idea. And people will help you.

About Losing Edge

Within any community you can only be a leader for so long before you either lose touch with reality or burn out. While new people are always inclined to follow "the experts" (thus helping them maintain their status), their continued success drives them so far away from reality that, eventually, people will notice. Also, just like most music bands and most book authors, at one point most web authors will run out of things to say. Once they start to believe that anything they say or write deserves success, they have lost their edge. They are putting themselves ahead of their website users. They create add-on products which may not be as good as the first one, and overcharge for them. They become less honest and their value erodes. Suddenly, they become the noise they once replaced. Then, finally, someone replaces them.

- by Aaron Wall, author of the SEOBook

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