There’s Nothing Wrong With Remembering The Beginning

There’s Nothing Wrong With Remembering The Beginning

A mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to sales, business or other online stuff (and I’ve made it myself,) is that we all have a tendency to forget the amateur mistakes we all make. This leads to us pretending we’re all eternal experts who devised our systems in a vacuum and never went through a learning period.

Once again, this thought came to me because of a couple of unrelated events this week:

• A couple of websites I read occasionally had a “falling out” over “who stole whose idea” (this is quite common in niche communities)
• I was researching for a new project, and found loads of holier-than-thou websites that insulted amateurs.

Both of these things are case studies for what not to do. I’ll talk about them individually and then wrap it up by linking both together towards the end.

Because I’m no angel in this matter, you can read yesterday’s article about a particularly stupid mistake I made when I started out. (Or, you can read back through the archives – I’ve written several articles about my own mistakes.)

You Don’t Exist In A Vacuum

The two sites above had a falling out over who came up with a particular piece of knowledge. Then they both wrote articles decrying the other about some soft form of plagiarism. Interestingly, both sites have taken those articles down now, presumably after realising the whole argument was better solved behind closed doors. (When it comes to plagiarism, it almost certainly is better off behind closed doors.)

More commonly, sites will just take ideas and use them as their own. You’ll see this in particular when you read life-hacking Tim Ferriss websites. One guy has the idea to take a cold shower whilst eating gluten-free Yak bacon and then a million websites spontaneously have the same idea.

Regardless of whether there’s an ethical/legal dimension to this, the fact is that it isn’t very smart. This is mainly for two reasons:

1. Other content providers are rarely direct competitors, and even when they are, you can’t stop readers going to their websites. Also, it’s not practical; unless you’re selling Lamborghinis where people will probably buy once in a lifetime, it’s not like a person is “stealing” your customers. People can choose both. When it comes to online readers, the argument is really stupid: I read hundreds of web pages. I don’t stick to one site on a subject.
2. People don’t just accept and stay on one internet page. Sure, you don’t want your sales letter to have 15 links to competitor sites and fifteen popups, but if I see something on a page and I want to know what it is, I’ll google it. That won’t affect whether I come back to the page or not at all.

In fact, I’d argue that no reference to anything else is weird. Especially when you’re talking about something like health benefits where you would expect the information to be linked to.

You Weren’t Always An Expert

I know I’ve written about this before. I can’t for the life of me remember which article talked about it, but I used the metaphor of bodybuilding websites specifically being useless for the people who need the information.

You don’t want to insult your target audience, and if you’re aiming for a beginner audience (like most niche sites are) you need to pitch it at their level of understanding (and patience.)

So, for instance, don’t launch weightlifting for beginners .com and then have your first two articles be:

• If you can’t bench 550 on your first day at the gym, you’re a BITCH and you should GIVE UP LIFTING
• The importance of dense mitro-phyloplasmin in your pre-workout stack and how it affects your 1RM

Those are two failures that are pretty obvious. Two more general guidelines:

1. You only get ten seconds or so. If a person is put off by you doing either of the above, or they think your website is beyond them, they’ll leave an (possibly) never come back.

Also, you’re talking about issues they don’t care about. As an example, when I bought a new camera, I couldn’t get it to focus. I waded through several review sites that wanted to sell me stuff, several youtube videos that did the same and several blog articles that talked about niche stuff that I didn’t understand at all. Guess who retained me as a reader? The final article I read that talked about why I was having the problem.

2. You’re missing out on a lot of traffic if you pitch your answers to an intermediate or expert audience.

People who are new to a niche are going to ask questions like, “How do I do X” and “Where can I get X?”

If you write articles above that level, you’re losing a lot of potential readers.

Final Thoughts

To draw these two mistakes together, it’s important to note that “being an authority” and having an “authority site” don’t mean be an over-the-top expert who sees (and writes) themselves as the one true source of inspiration.

People do want to know about your mistakes and your journey, because it gives them an A to B.

People do want to know how you came to your ideas and conclusions, because we intuitively link information, we don’t just generate it out of nowhere.