What do you do if you don’t have ten thousand subscribers?

Answer: Act as if you do.

I remember a story about a woman who went to the Rabbi with a problem.

Rabbi, she said, I no longer believe in the Word. I’ve lost my faith. Life has no meaning. What should I do?

Well daughter, said the Rabbi. All is not lost.  If you have no faith there is only one thing you can do.

But what is that? The woman asked.

If you have no faith, said the Rabbi, of course, you must act as if you do.

The woman went away and very soon found that her faith returned, simply because she was living her life as if she believed.

So what’s the message here?

If you have no subscribers, or very few, you need to act as if you have thousands. This way you won’t lose hope, or worse, lose faith in your ability to succeed.

I recently read a post by Ben Settle who had been asked a similar question:

Is it worth emailing regularly to a very small list of subscribers?

His answer was most definitely yes.

Why, because each email you send out becomes a post in its own right and your content grows every time you send to your list. Pretty soon you’ll have a great swag of original content that will propel your site through the Google rankings and earn you the street cred you need to get noticed.

That’s when you really start to build your subscription list.

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I’m doing an experiment for a new blog. If you were looking for information on how to write your memoirs how would you answer the questions below?

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photo credit: valcanno

You know it’s bad when you have to go searching for your WordPress password. It gets worse when you suddenly realise you haven’t posted to Twitter for two whole days. It’s like…what am I doing to myself? I know the world will stop if my followers don’t get at least six tweets a day from me, and all carefully timed to go out so they hit the global audience at breakfast, lunch and dinner, with careful attention to time zones.

But wait! There’s more. I haven’t written day 16 of the 21 articles I need to post to ezinearticles.com. I haven’t hit Squidoo, eHow, Yahoo Answers, Technorati and all the rest with my latest SEO attack.

Okay. Enough already. 2010 was all about process. 2011 will be all about sitting back and letting it happen. If only.

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Suddenly everybody’s promoting the use of video as a marketing tool and a better way of distributing information generally. But I have a problem with that.

Agreed, there are advantages to marketing via video. When selling a product:

• You can present directly to the prospective customer
• The customer can see you and make a judgement about the ‘authenticity’ of your message.
• You, as a marketer, can hold their attention and communicate directly.
• The customer, unless they hit the stop button, is forced to watch the whole presentation until they get the message.

While I’m not disputing all of the above, I really hope video doesn’t take too much away from the online experience.

Let me explain

I recently watched Rosalind Gardner’s video outlining her predictions for affiliate marketing in 2010. While the video was obviously meant to be a quick overview of her research and I appreciated it as such, I missed the functionality that a similar presentation in text would have provided.

To me, hypertext is the defining principle of the Internet. Where once we had flat one-dimensional text that could only be mined by delving further into physical libraries of information, we now have deep links that can take us practically anywhere we want to go.

For example, Rosalind mentions that “Forrester Research predicted that by 2014 affliate marketing would become a four billion dollar industry”. This is information I might want to read, but video, unlike hypertext, doesn’t let me take it any further. Certainly I can do a google search on Forrester Research and come up with the information myself, but somehow I now expect the online author to do that work for me.

Hypertext is what makes the Internet such a powerfully persuasive tool. By allowing us to drill down into deeper levels of information and ideas we can make better judgements about the facts presented to us.
Let’s not get too far away from that.

But don’t ignore video

Video is obviously great for people who have poor English skills and to pitch to those who just hate to read. As an instructional tool it’s brilliant. Screen captures, presentations, demonstrations of how things are done, these are all powerfull methods for getting a message across.

I intend to use video when it’s appropriate, but perhaps with straight-to-camera pieces it’s a good idea to include links underneath the multimedia box that point to the information referenced in the presentation. That way we get to take full advantage of all the Internet has to offer.

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