I’m writing this post in response to Splork over at LostBallInHighWeeds who recently blogged about: Bloggers Blogging About Blogs Suck…
The post was another epic rant from Splork on the many con men and charlatans that exist in the make money online blogging circuit. His chief complaint being that no one is blogging about anything new; they’re all just regurgitating the same shit over and over again. Prolly just repackaging it and “making it their own” you know and all that garbage about how you can “rewrite” and “repurpose” already existing content to make it your own…
Frankly here’s the deal. I think if you’re out there looking for your voice or looking for direction or inspiration I think you got it all wrong.
I’ve been reading a book by Dale Carnegie lately. The name of the book is How To Stop Worrying And Start Living. It’s really a good book I recommend it to anyone who has trouble with stress. Back to my point though.
One of the chapters talks about how one of the biggest known stressors to mankind is a person’s desire to be someone other then themselves. A quote from the book which is a quote from Emerson in his essay on “Self Reliance”:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide…
Another quote from the book which explains why following and paving your own path as on online entrepreneur is really the best way to go forward.
This craving to be something you are not is especially rampant in Hollywood. Sam Wood, one of Hollywood’s best known directors, said the greatest headache he has is with aspiring young actors is exactly this problem: to make them be themselves. They all want to be second-rate Lana Turners or third-rate Clark Gables. “The public has already has that flavor,” Sam Wood keeps telling them; “now it wants something else.”
(btw for those that don’t know Dale Carnegie lived a looong time ago…)
The public wants something else and you just have to ask yourself this question: “Am I ready to give myself to the world, flaws and all, and fail or succeed on my ow merits?” The blogosphere is no different… nobody wants to hear or read another Seth Godin or Problogger.
There’s a lot to learn out there in the blogosphere but something I’ve talked about before is that no one, and I do mean no one, is sharing any secrets about making money online or driving legitimate traffic to a website. The charlatans and con’s, ala Mike Filsaime and John Chow, are just that charlatans and con’s pretending to know what they don’t know so they can make a dollar off of you.
One of the biggest keys in this business is being able to recognize who is for real and who is blowing smoke up yer ass.
The other key is being yourself because most of us that have been doing this for awhile can see the fakes a long way away and we don’t want to hear another regurgitation of another regurgitation. Follow proven tactics and techniques but be yourself and you might start experiencing some success and seeing your website take off. And by be yourself I mean find something that you actually want to talk about day after day and be yourself; don’t just jump into the make money online niche because Mike Filsaime said you could make millions doing it!
In a nutshell, stop looking for secrets because no real authority is willing to share them; most will share generalities and that’s about it. It’s up to you to figure everything else out. Start applying what you already know and you will discover the secrets on your own. And then you’ll discover what the real authorities already know… that’s its just lunacy to give away your secrets because they will cease to work in a short matter of time.
