It’s getting harder to cheat (8 of 10)

So, yesterday, I talked about building up permission-based audiences. A community of people who WANT to hear from you.

I think it has everything to do with your ability to weather the trends online and the centralization that is happening.

It all adds up to one thing…

It is getting a lot harder to “cheat”. And quite frankly, this is a great thing for you if you want to serve. It isn’t a great thing for you if you want to shortcut the system.

Take Google, for instance. It used to be that you could game the system and rank your site in search results by stuffing keywords, buying backlinks and all that crap. It was all cheating. It wasn’t about providing real value… it was about tricking Google.

Or on Facebook, people thought quantity of fans was the big thing. So, they’d go to Fiverr and buy fans.

Or Youtube. More views, the better right? So, go to Fiverr, pay a few bucks, and they’d run your video through some bot that would refresh it over and over again to rack up the view count.

Twitter? Well, you can buy followers. Or do the auto-follow thing where you follow them and if they don’t follow back you unfollow. All powered by a bot, of course.

Numerous ways to cheat or game the system.

And, it’s easy to want to do stuff like that. For people who want to talk the talk but not walk the walk, you could give the semblance of “famous” by gaming the system.

But, it got a lot harder. Google’s algorithm got a lot smarter and those old tactics just don’t work anymore. Facebook is all about engagement and “fans” you paid for don’t engage, so that’s out the window. Paid Twitter followers? Well, if you like tweeting out to a bunch of empty accounts and bots, have at it.

And, as we’ve talked about here in this series, even the ability to pay to reach people online (with ads) is going to evolve, too.

Relationship is everything. And, one’s ability to find a way to cheat the system is dwindling.

It comes down to basic human nature.

Look at dating, as an example.

You probably can’t cheat the system to get a girl to marry you. You have to convince her. You have to earn it. It might be easy to act like something you’re not in the beginning, but before too long your true self is known. Warts and all. They either like it or not.

And so it is online.

So, ask yourself, when it comes to your blog and your business…

Are you worth dating?

Not in a literal sense, of course. We’re talking in an analogy.

Are you being just one-date material? Are you earning the second date? Are you… marriage material?

Again, this is an analogy!

You funny people.

See ya tomorrow.

– David