Want Online Success? Play The Fool! (Part 1)

At least that is the feeling I got after reading some posts last week on the blogs I follow. Although this matter doesn’t look so serious, I feel that it is very important in terms of sociological and psychological background of online business and blogging if you like.

What the hell am I talking about? I know that might seem a bit strange but last week it seems like I was bumping to those statements in each text or blog posts that I tried to read. It might be my personal feeling though, or something that I was looking for to read, or something that I misunderstood. But I couldn’t beat the feeling that playing the fool was the best way to succeed and get recognized in the blogosphere. Let me explain.

We all heard a lot of statement recently on how internet marketing is over saturated and how blags are not profitable anymore and so on. I need to say that I agree on some (if not most) of those remarks. There is more people trying to make money and pay their bills blogging today than one year ago and much more than 5 years ago. Is it possible to succeed? I am sure it is as much as there are always fresh, rising stars in any other market. Is it harder? Of course it is. That is why people try to find new ways and new tactics of being recognized online.

However, at the very beginning you are in the middle of the two way road, and the question is which way you want to take. One is deciding to be yourself. Average guy or girl trying to make a living, who learned a lot about honesty and truth. You decide to be yourself and trying to teach and preach and eventually become one of the gurus. All your posts are deep thoughts, true and educational (or at least that is what you think) Then you see after so many months and so much hard work that your blog has very few visitors and almost no profits. And you become depressed. I’ve seen that many times.

On the other side, your friend started a blog in the same time. He took a different road. He created a virtual personality and each his post was junk (or at least that is what you think). He played the fool. Each his post was purely marketing and buzz oriented. He posted a lot of controversial stuff and semi-shocking pictures and what else not. And he just took his family to expensive vacation because his blog is a golden egg. Not fair, right?

Maybe it is not fair, but it’s perfectly logical. Ask yourself – “Who is a person I would like to learn or read articles from?”. I am sure most of you would say that you would only learn or read articles from someone who already succeeded and who has a lot of followers. Someone with reputation. See? That is easy. That is something called reversible thinking. And this technique gives you a lot of answers. Translate that to your blog or online business and it means that people would most likely rather subscribe to a feed that already has thousands of subscribers than to feed that has only few of them. Most of webmasters in MMO (Making Money Online) niche would rather read and regularly visit a PR6 site than PR1 site. Why? Well the very logical question is – why would I read your blog about online marketing if you couldn’t even market your own site? Although it sounds harsh and rude, I must agree on this one.

This article begs for more in depth analysis and more info. That is why I will write and post Part 2 of this article tomorrow, together with some interesting experiments that I plan to do on my blog. Did you join our feed readers? You can do it here.