Rule #1 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Unique Content Is Not Enough.
It’s a sea of information out there.
You must have unique content. I don’t mean “unique” just in the sense that your material is not an exact duplicate of material available elsewhere. I mean that your material must discuss important ideas not considered elsewhere. It must rock people.
The internet surfer is like the employer who places a “Help Wanted” advertisement in a town where the largest employer recently went out of business. He is looking to impose filters on the flood of material being directed his way. He’s on the look-out for good content, just as the employer is on the look-out for a good worker. But he has learned that he must direct most of his mental energies not to seeking information bits but to avoid being drowned in them. Having too much information to sort through is not much better than having none at all.
No one is going to fall in love with your site without first paying attention to it. No one is going to pay attention unless you provide him or her a compelling reason to do so. Unique content is not enough. Putting up unique content is like sending in a resume showing that you are qualified for the job. That only gets you past the first of many filters. You need compellingly unique content, knock-their-socks-off stuff.
Rule #2 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Long Is Strong.
One response that many recommend for dealing with the sea-of-information problem is to keep it short. The reader is pressed for time. Keep it short, and you place less of a burden on him. Keep it short, and maybe you have a chance.
I see the logic, but I don’t buy into the strategy. Keeping it short conflicts with the goal of developing knock-their-socks-off stuff. How many important points can you get across in 500 words? You certainly do not want to include unnecessary words; wasting your readers’ time will get you nixed fast. But you’re better to go long than to go weak. You must have knock-their-socks-off material, and, if it takes some time to develop the points you need to make, then it takes some time to develop the points you need to make.
Rule #3 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Money Can’t Buy Personality.
There’s been a big change in the past five years (this article was posted in December 2007). Big corporations are taking over the internet. They’re tough competition. Money buys a big edge.
You can’t beat the corporations at their own game. You cannot match their dollars. All the money in the world cannot buy a corporation a personality. Your best hope is developing the thing that makes you special to its fullest. Don’t aim to fit in. Seek to stand out.
Rule #4 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Search Will Become Increasingly Customized.
Search engines are not smart. They are dumb. What makes them look sort of smart is that they are so darn fast. Search engines do dumb stuff really, really, really, really fast.
The ideal search engine would be one in which humans ranked the sites responsive to a query. That one has been tried and has failed. Humans do better work than the machines but they cannot keep up with the volume. Machines are the more economical choice. We’re stuck with them.
Still, every push to improve search results is a push to make them more like what they would be if prepared by humans. The most promising idea being explored today is having a machine remember what sorts of search results you have liked in the past so that it can provide you similar results in response to future search queries.
I like long stuff. I like thoughtful stuff. I’m not so crazy about numbers. I like “soft” emotion-focused stuff. It’s a dumb search engine that responds to my request for information on “how investing works” only with results citing conventional thinking and statistical studies and jizz-jazz like that. I prefer a different sort of jizz-jazz! My guess is that I will be getting it on the internet of tomorrow.
There are lots of strategic implications. I face a lot of competition getting ranked for the phrase “buy-and-hold.” But I know of no one else writing on the internet who puts forward the take on how to succeed at buy-and-hold that I put forward. As searches become more customized, I expect that I will stand a better chance of ranking for search queries relating to buy-and-hold investing. I won’t rank for all such queries. I’ll rank for buy-and-hold queries put forward by searchers who have demonstrated a preference for long, thoughtful, non-numbers-oriented, soft-side stuff.
I write that sort of thing today with the hope that searchers looking for that stuff will be able to find me tomorrow.
Rule #5 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — The Techhead is Dead.
Techies found the internet first. For obvious reasons. They have come to believe that they own the playground. They do not own the playground.
Normals are becoming a more important force on the internet. All sorts of implications follow. There will be less of a focus on libertarian politics (I have nothing in particular against libertarian politics, but libertarian voices are absurdly overrepresented on the internet of today). Articles that present a multi-discipline take on a topic will stand a better chance of being noticed (techies tend to go deep but not broad). “Poetic” headlines will become more popular (techies like lists). Articles offering more than one side of a story will get more play (techies are not comfortable with ambiguity).
Rule #6 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Combine Informality with Professionalism.
Google has a thing they call “Trust Rank.” Bizarre worked well on yesterday’s internet, but is not quite so winning a take on today’s.
That doesn’t mean that we are going to get stuffy. People warm up to informal. People are turned off by stuffy.
The idea is to win over people’s trust with an informal but professional approach. One “trick” that I use is to be up front about my weaknesses (I write about personal finance but am not good with numbers) while demonstrating that I can be trusted (I take a hard stand against the analytically invalid Old School safe withdrawal rate studies).
Rule #7 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — No Internet Writer Is An Island.
The greatest power of the internet is the power it provides to create communities. To make this thing work, you gotta have friends. When you become part of a community, the influence of everything you produce is leveraged.
There was little information available on early retirement when I began researching the topic in the early 1990s. There are today thousands of sites and blogs that deal with this topic in some way. If I cannot add anything unique to the mix, I need to hang it up. To be able to create something perceived to be of value, I need to tap into the power of the community of people interested in this topic, find out what they care about, and focus my energies on learning something special about those questions.
You cannot be a lone wolf. You need to be part of a group. You need to stand out from the crowd too, though, or else your content will not be sufficiently unique for you to be heard above the crowd noise.
Rule #8 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Be True.
Sayings become clichés for a reason. When people say that you can’t trust what you read on the internet, they are saying something real. I should know.
That’s not the whole story, however. There is a sense in which you can trust what you read on the internet more than you can trust what you read in a book or in a magazine article or in a newspaper article. There’s more of an opportunity for feedback from a variety of perspectives to be advanced on the internet. That’s a big plus for this new communications medium.
I often write about how big-name investing advisors play word games when offering advice on stocks (because those heavily invested in stocks will become angry with them if they reveal all they know about how valuations affect long-term returns). I don’t think that’s going to fly too much longer. It’s too easy today for someone to run a search on an expert’s name and compare what he said in one place with what he said in another place. Fudging it is becoming a dangerous strategy.
I think you are making a mistake if you act like you know more than you know. Don’t apologize for what you do know. Sometimes you have to toot your own horn a bit; I think that can be justified on grounds that you want to be sure to get the word out to those who need to know what you do know. But there are too many people watching on the internet of today for those putting on an act to get away with it for long. That’s only going to be more true on the internet of tomorrow.
Rule #9 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Find an Expandable Niche.
It makes all the sense in the world to identify a niche and come to own it. You want to be the best at writing about what you write about and it takes a lot of time to become the best in an area where there is lots of competition. Niches are limiting, however. Only a tiny percentage of the people who see your stuff will be serious enough to engage in transactions putting money in your pocket. To make a living on the internet, you need at some point to reach beyond your initial niche.
I don’t like the idea of building multiple sites. Lots of people follow this strategy and perhaps my bias is unjustified. Building multiple sites is putting your eggs in more than a single basket. I question, though, whether you can gain sufficient expertise in multiple niches to offer compelling material relating to all of them.
I recommend seeking an expanding niche, an area that can be explored small for a time but can at some later date be blown up into a topic broad enough to appeal to lots of readers. Early retirement is my niche. This article is about writing for the internet. Does it belong? My sense is that among the type of people interested in early retirement there are a good number interested in writing for the internet, either for the fun of it (after achieving financial independence) or as a means of supplementing a corporate salary or the income provided in retirement by investments. I think that this article fits (just barely) at a site exploring a blown-up version of the Retire Early story.
Rule #10 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Avoid Clutter.
The reason why I don’t carry advertising at this site today is not that I don’t like my writing efforts to generate money. It’s that I worry that the clutter that comes with low-payout advertising would make it harder for me to get my message across.
I’ll go with some form of advertising someday. My hope is that I will be able to grow the site large enough that I will be able to go with a form of advertising that brings in a significant amount of money without cluttering up all the pages of the site. If that idea doesn’t come through for me, I may break down at some point and accept advertising clutter as a necessary evil.
My point here is that advertising is not cost-free. Too many advertisements make your site uninviting and your arguments hard to follow. We all have to pay the bills. But I think that many site owners need to give more consideration to the downside of putting up too many advertisements.
Rule #11 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Each Generation Reads Less.
Most people don’t like to read. The way it is.
Articles with graphics work better that articles with only words. Articles with audio work better than articles with graphics. Articles with video work better than articles with audio.
Repent! Repent! The End Is Near!
Rule #12 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — It’s a Winner-Take-All Game.
There’s room for very few winners. Those who make it to the top make out like crazy.
We all know this. It’s hard for us to accept on a deep level just how true this really is, however. The pyramid concept is a counter-intuitive one. We expect there to be some reward for those who get close to the top but not quite over the hump and for there to be some limit to what those who reach the top can take away with them.
The more I learn about this game, the more convinced I become that it is all but impossible to exaggerate how much this is a winner-take-all game.
Rule #13 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Friendliness Does Not Hurt.
The fact that it is a winner-take-all game does not suggest that you need to be a heartless competitor. Quite to the contrary. The reality is that the odds are so much against any of us making it to the top that it is silly to worry that helping out a competitor is going to cause you harm. In the unlikely event that someone you help out gets over the hump, that will end up being a plus because your friend will enjoy such an embarrassment of riches that even a decision by him or her to throw you a few crumbs could turn into something significant.
Rule #14 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — The First-Mover Advantage Is Real.
It was easy to get to the top of the search engines with ordinary articles 10 years ago. Then those who were first with audio went to the front of the pack. Then those who were first with blogs went to the front of the pack. Then those who were first with video went to the front of the pack. Then those who were first with social media went to the front of the pack.
It’s a whole big bunch easier to stay at the front of the pack once you get there than it is to get there in the first place. So it makes sense strategically to chase new technologies and new trends. It does not make sense to chase them all. Dividing your efforts will cause you always to get to the finish line a few steps too late to make things happen. Choose your spots with intelligence and then put everything into a race to get high enough in the rankings for a time to build something of permanence.
Rule #15 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — The Steep Climb Works to Your Benefit Once You Get to the Top.
There’s one good thing to be said about the steep climb to the top. It makes it hard for anyone to displace you once you get there.
Rule #16 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Don’t Link Around.
I have a tough linking policy. Well, it’s not tough on my readers. It’s tough on site owners seeking to “trade links.”
A link sends a message. The message is “I urge you to take some of your valuable time and spend it checking out this other site.” It worries me that it sounds rude to tell a site owner seeking a link exchange “no.” But my first loyalty is to my readers. Even wonderful sites do not merit a link from me unless they are wonderful sites for my particular community, a community of people interested in the topics explored in depth at this site.
I do what I can to help out fellow site owners. I answer their questions when I can. I offer any benefit there is in knowing about anything I’ve learned from my limited experience playing this game. But I don’t give links unless it helps my readers for me to do so. A writer crafts messages. A link is a message. If you allow your message to be cheapened by giving links for the wrong reason, you undermine your efforts in a serious way. That sort of thing catches up to you.
Rule #17 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Don’t Worry Too Much About Search Engine Optimization Stuff.
You need to pay some attention to the rules of search engine optimization. You’ll be unfairly penalized if you do not.
I cannot bring myself to care too much about that stuff, however. Some of the rules are just too dumb. The headline is only supposed to be a certain number of characters. The key search term must appear near the front of the title; near the back isn’t good enough. Site section titles must state clearly and precisely and plainly and instantly what the section is about (no “Retire Different!,” no “Upsizing,” no “Investing for Humans”). I hurt myself by not following the rules. But I believe that hurting myself in this way gives my site more zip and that the penalties imposed for breaking the rules will be less onerous as time passes.
It’s a mistake to dumb yourself down too much for the benefit of the search engines. The engines will get smarter in time. Then you’re going to feel foolish for having dumbed yourself down.
Don’t break the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules, however. That’s even dumber.
Rule #18 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Get People Mad at You.
I am a go-along-to-get-along guy by nature. I don’t like getting caught up in controversy. I don’t like standing out. One of my friends from my Motley Fool days said that I posted in those days “like a puppy dog.” And it’s so, it’s so!
Still, I’ve made some people mad with things I have said about stock investing in recent years. Look to the tabs at the left-hand side of this page. Do you see the one entitled “Stock Drunk”? There are people who do not care for that sort of thing. My writing pisses those people off. Big time.
So be it, you know?
That’s not really the way I feel about it. The raw truth is that it hurts my feelings when someone visits my site, sees that I talk about what it means to be stock drunk and puts the slip of paper with my telephone number on it in the trashcan. But there comes a time when you have to accept that you have a job to do and you gotta do it well.
The next line in the song is: “You gotta give the other fella hell!”
I don’t recommend that you court controversy for the purpose of generating “link bait.” People see through fakers. Stick around a bit and you won’t need to fake it, though. If you are learning enough about your niche to become the king of it, there will come a time when you won’t go looking for controversy but it will come looking for you. When you are the only one who can say something in the way that it needs to be said, you need to do that. That’s the job. That’s why you’re here.
Be kind. Be humble. Be fair. Be balanced.
But also be strong. Be firm. Be passionate. Be bold.
If some people get mad, some people get mad. I’ve thought about this one a long, long, long time.
Rule #19 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Don’t Fall Into the Trap of Thinking that People Are Dumb.
There’s a subtext to many articles of the nature of this one that suggests that people can be manipulated, that people are dumb. I hope that I have not fallen into that trap. People are not dumb. People are smart.
People play dumb sometimes. That’s because they’re smart. People sometimes keep quiet because the discussion is focused on something outside of their areas of particular strength. That’s smart. People will sometimes seem dumb to you. That’s usually because it is you who are dumb. If you were smarter, you would remember each time you started thinking that people are dumb that people really are smart.
Rule #20 for Writing for the Internet of Tomorrow — Learn by Doing.
I don’t write articles on topics I know little about. That would obviously be a bad use of my time.
I don’t only write about topics that I know like the back of my hand either. Sometimes you have to stretch yourself. Sometimes you have to put yourself out there more than just a wee bit.
Sometimes you fall flat on your face. You feel like the largest Elizabeth in the world. That’s one of the prices you agreed to pay when you signed up for this gig. That’s how you learn.
If you take a look at your best stuff, you will find that it came about as the result of a process in which you first took a few failed runs at the hill and then later came back at it and got to the top. If every article is a winner, you are not taking enough chances. The job is not just to educate your readers. It is to educate you too.