As some of you know, I have a site I’ve been working on and several of you are “pioneers” on the site, helping me with testing and whatnot, for which I am extremely grateful.
In a discussion with some friends on Skype, the question arose of what my site was about and why someone would want to be a member.
That’s a question I’ve been struggling with quite some time. Sometimes, you know you have a good idea on your hands, but you’re not entirely sure how to express it. I think that’s a reason why some really good ideas never go anywhere. How often do you see a crummy product overtake the market place while a truly excellent product ends up in the margins, and sometimes the parent company folds? Sometimes, I think it’s because they weren’t as able to convince people of the value of their product while the junk peddlers were.
But, I did answer the question by way of a bit of a rant, which goes something like what follows…
Content plus discussions is the very basic thing of my site. But, more like a casual newspaper, where you get the information you need and can comment on it, discuss it with other users and so forth. Basically, the typical forum.
The main thing is the content and discussion forums, both of which are admittedly light at the moment. You have to be registered on the site in order to participate in the forums or leave comments on articles.
I like Twitter. I’ve met great people on Twitter. But then hack-marketers went loose on it and largely ruined it. For the most part, DMs are essentially useless because it’s just abused with spammers. You had people giving advice like “Send a thank you for following and include your sales pitch and link” and so you’d follow someone that seemed interesting and, right away, you’d get a junk DM.
Twitter does a fairly decent job of getting rid of the blatant spammers, but there are so many borderline ones that clutter things up. People set up fake profiles and whatnot and it’s just a mess.
I remember one blatant spammer that had this pyramid scam for gaining followers. The only one that really gained followers was himself and his loyal cadre of his initial participants. But, like everything else MLM, the people at the bottom levels got squat. Meanwhile, he’s DMing each new follower with some eBook he’s selling–probably on making money on Twitter or something–and making hundreds (or maybe thousands) of dollars.
He still has a Twitter account too. If I were Twitter, I would have kicked him out.
Similarly with Facebook, that’s just getting crowded with hack-marketers too. ”Friend me and like my page so I can send you tons of garbage offers on a regular basis in the hopes that you’ll buy my stinking pile of doggy doo.”
And don’t forget about MySpace. Ugh.
I’m tired of it. Way back when, way back when Bulletin Board Systems and FreeNets were the norm, if you had users like that, you kicked them to the curb! Nowadays, there are no mods or administrators. It’s only the blatant, en masse spammers that get kicked out.
Just look in the Internet Marketing sphere. There’s a big name so-called “guru” that was fined nearly a quarter of a million dollars for making income claims that weren’t sustainable for most buyers. Yet, he’s still out there peddling his stuff and has a loyal following of people.
So, I like to think of my site as a bit of a throwback to the old days. When you had someone come through town selling snake oil, you chased him out. Or, the sheriff caught him on his way in, and told him he best be peddling his trinkets elsewhere.
The only marketers I really want around are the ones that understand relationship marketing and not the hack-marketers that think they can earn their millions by blasting their link each and every place they can.
There’ll be ads and stuff for sale and the like, but I want to cut out a lot of the noise. I’ll do my best to cut off the spammers at the pass and readily kick them out if they do sneak in.
So, if you look for content on something you’re interested in, you’re going to find it. You’re not going to have to sift through a bunch of junk to do so. You’re not going to have to sort through a bunch of “buy my eBook” sales pitches masquerading as answers to do so. And, if you can’t find it, you can ask other people for help. And those people are going to give you direction and not a sales pitch to buy their eBook.
The Internet is sort of like the Big City. You’ve got lots of stuff there, but you also have scammers and slick salespeople trying to sell you something on every corner and in every alley.
My site would be the Suburbs. A lot of the benefits of the Big City but with fewer of the drawbacks.