It’s a good little phrase, “Actionable Information”.
Unfortunately I didn’t come up with it, Michelle McPherson did in this blog post with is replete with informational nibbly bits.
The post is good because it proposes simple solutions to a simple problem that people love to over complicate.
Hell is doing the same thing over and over again and failing and not learning and tweaking next time round to stop the madness.
You see it all the time online, I see it all the time online.
And that’s a good thing if you get it, because you can slip between the shadows and work it when others are still scratching their head wondering why they can’t fit in watching the complete Sopranos DVD boxset with online domination of the “Hamster Cage” niche.
It’s one reason I stopped reading SEO blogs.
Title tags? Really, what, put them in my web pages? Cool, thanks.
It’s not that SEO is dead, it’s just that you can learn 97% of all you need in 20 minutes. And if you then go on a 6 week course in how to crank out fancy reports you can make tons of cash as an SEO agency.
The reality is:
- SEO is really link building
- Linkbuilding is not about quality, it’s about scale.
- Link building is not about scale, it’s about publishing actionable information.
You mean you have actionable information and you are not putting it on your website?
Are you an idiot?
You mean you own a carpet cleaning company and you didn’t publish an article about how much it would cost to clean the red carpet at the Royal Wedding and how many bottles of cleaning fluid you would need and wether or not you would youse a fine brush filter or a coarse one?
It’s not hard.
But you do have to think in a way that is antithetical to how you would build a carpet cleaning company.
Which is why linkbaiters get hired and why they never show you pictures of their office (it’s usually in a bit of a state).
If you have a website, you are a publisher, Do you think like a publisher? Do you know what a publisher thinks like. They think like Rupert Murdoch, Felix Dennis, Hugh Hefner. If they ran the content part of your website, what do you think would happen to the traffic?
Publishing on the web, is exactly the same as publishing on paper.
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
“Think you’re a salesman you sonofabitch?” (Points for naming the film)
It’s the same principles.
You have to go backwards, not forwards to win in this game.
If you think it’s about the latest tool, then you are the Tool. (not sure that translates but megh)
Go back about 4,000 years and you will find the first published list and it still gets talked about.
Truth is, lists work.
2nd Truth is, people moan about lists and yet for some mysterious reason still read them, share them, comment about them.
The human brain hasn’t simply changed into a new way of thinking since the Internet came along.
- Sex
- Death
- Money
- Power
- Health
- More sex
Things have not changed, the lizard brain is a hungry beast and will feed before any other part.
Stop being a clever arse and start being an actionable-information production machine.