• Hustlers
• Spin Doctors

Hustlers are successful because they can mobilise a lot of resources to get the necessary social votes required to get their linkbait to the front page. They will spend money, use leverage, call in favors and generally ask, ask, ask for social votes until they get them and get to the top. These are the people who lead the herd, so to speak, through leverage.

Spin Doctors are successful because they know - either by experience or intuition - how to tap into basic emotions on a mass level. They pull at heart strings, challenge your mind and provoke / evoke action. These are the people who can take the most boring content and give it a fresh and interesting twist.

Which one are you?

It’s not a choice, it’s self-discovery. Are you better at understanding how people tick (not yourself, OTHER people) or are you better at gaining leverage and authority in social circles (online and offline)?

There is no good or bad, it just IS. This is how the linkbaiting game - and on a broader spectrum, the marketing game - works. Accept it, find out what you’re good at and work on polishing it till you’re in the top 5%.

Or outsource it, because if you’re not in the top 5%, you’re wasting more resources than you’re going to be making back from your efforts.

How To Gain Leverage And Authority

• Follow Ryan Caldwell’s path (Performancing.com).
• Learn the art of positioning yourself.
• The key is momentum - keep building your contact network and invest as heavily as you can in it.
• Eventually it will start paying off, and when it does, intensify your efforts (keep up the momentum).
• Don’t ease off the gas even when you’re guaranteed front-page because of your ‘friends’ - unless you start to piss people off (but you’re smart enough not to do that, right?).

Learning How People Tick

• Monitor the most popular posts on various social media sites.
• Eliminate those that are community-specific (Reddit has a very strong political community, Digg has the whole Microsoft-bashing thing, etc).
• Pick content that goes viral on more than one social media site AND gets a lot of natural backlinks.
• Read this. Then understand why this is instant linkbait.

It Takes Two…

Whether you’re a master hustler or the best spin doctor on the planet, you’re not going to be as successful by yourself as you’ll be in partnership with someone who complements your qualities perfectly.

Sometimes linkbait can take off by itself - but having someone get it more votes will help give it a bigger push, hence the extra exposure. Most of the time hustling votes with mediocre content is enough to get exposure, but quality content will have a life of its own AND will generate more links.

If your strength is in managing votes, find the best linkbait writers and partner up with them. Vice versa. This counts especially when you’re outsourcing - make sure both sides of the deal (quality and promotion) are handled.

To Summarise:

• Find out what your strength is (leverage v ideas that move people)
• Polish your skills
• Partner up with someone having the opposite skill-set
• Linkbait your site to double-digit Alexa rankings (hey, it’s possible!)

Why? I could have written the 8 principles down and shared them here, but as with any essential-to-life message, the delivery method is as important as the points made themselves.

So go ahead, watch it. Because you need to do it right now.

And remember to share it - social media, email, chat, or just call over anyone who is nearby and get them to watch it.

Watch. Then share.

If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can read the whole Google News publishers’ help section and get information on all the above plus answers to more specific questions, such as how sites are ranked in Google News, how to setup Google News sitemaps and lots more.

But if you want the 5-step process of what you need to do to have your blog accepted for inclusion in Google News, read on:

Step 1: Article URLs must be unique and include a 3-digit number

Related reading: Article URLs

In order to identify separate news items, Google requires publishers to have unique, permanent URLs for each article. For blogs (and especially WordPress blogs) that’s not a difficult thing to manage, but Google have a second requirement that ensures that each article included by Google is unique.

Google requires each url to include a unique number consisting of at least 3 digits. How you do it for your blog depends on your blogging / CMS platform, but for WordPress users there’s an easy fix:

Go to Settings / Options > Permalinks, select the ‘custom’ option and copy-paste the code below in the text box:

/%postname%/%post_id%/

This causes your post urls to have a unique number at the end (you can set this up any way you want, with or without the slashes, put the numbers at the start or at the end).

Thanks to the overarching need for having a quality website to be accepted by Google News, your site / blog will need to be in existence for a few months before it can be considered for listing. In that time you *should* have at least 100 or more posts on your blog, allowing you to always meet the requirement for the unique number to be at least 3 digits.

If you are changing your URL structure, you can use this permalink redirect plugin which allows you to do an automatic 301 redirect from your old permalink structure to the new one.

You’re welcome.

While sticking to the default permalink structure that a Wordpress installation offers works for Google News (see here), using keyword-rich permalinks will help you in improving your search rankings in Google and making your site more reader-friendly.

Step 2: Avoid Non-Standard Content

Google News might have problems with frames, and it definitely does not support multi-language pages or non-html (your WordPress posts are html) content such as images, PDFs and Flash videos. With most blogs this shouldn’t be a problem - just make sure that each article that you have dedicated to image(s) / video(s) / other non-standard content has descriptive text about it in the post.

Step 3: Meet Google’s Quality Criteria

The big secret to getting listed in Google to build a quality site, make sure you meet 1 or 2 structural requirements (they need some specific information to be available on your website) and you’re good to go.

Here are a few explicit requirements (taken directly from my own experience with Google News):

>> have news content that is original to the site

That’s a no-brainer - Google doesn’t want duplicate content on their News site.

>> Don’t solely promote your own activities

News about something, just not about yourself / your company.

>> is written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors and has easily accessible organizational and contact information

This is met by maintaining a ‘team’ page (examples: SL Authors, SE Roundtable Authors), providing detailed contact information (including a physical address) on your contact page, and by providing a history of your website / organisation on your about page.

In other words, they want evidence that your website is backed by a serious organisation dedicated to providing quality news coverage. Give them all the indications that you are one.

A word on ‘organisational information’ - in my experience a formal detailing of responsibilities was not required, but then again I had provided roles and designations on the ‘team page’ itself. You might want to add a ‘company’ page if you want to cover your bases. If I was to do it all over again, I certainly would.

>> have a clearly defined terms of service / privacy policy

That’s simple - just write a simple TOS and an easy to understand privacy policy (examples of these are littered across the internet) and you’re good to go.

Step 4: Review

Make sure everything is in order before you submit. Of all the requirements, proving (more than just showing them names and pages) that your site is a serious news source is something that requires time (I’d recommend 6 months to 1 year for small companies, 3 months for large organisations). You need to build an archive of quality articles and demonstrate that your news site has been (and is being) regularly updated for a long period of time. It’s part and parcel of building a good site with the added requirement of having a team of writers (instead of a solo blogger). How you manage that is up to you - I managed it by bringing in guest columnists and paid editors.

Step 5: Submit

You’re ready to go - submit your site using this form.

Questions? Let me know in the comments.

Here are a few top resources to help you along the way:

1. The all-in-one

For a one-stop guide to launching a blog, read Chris G’s (if not Performancing’s) most important article:

How To: Launch a new blog the easy way

Chris walks you through the entire process of planning to executing a blog launch. Or if you’re in a hurry, read these 7 steps to launching a great blog.

2. Strictly planning

Some thoughts on planning for blogs:

27 tips for building a kick-ass blog

Planning a new blog venture

Writing Self-Sustaining Blogs

Positioning Your Blog

Planning a new blog? Get started already!

3. If you’re blogging for money…

10 business models for bloggers

10 Step Plan to a Profitable Blog

4. For bloggers:

20 types of pages that every blogger should consider

10 articles all bloggers should read at least once

21 ways to build a better blogger

I’ll be adding more to this list in the future - if there’s anything specific that you want to read more about, let me know.

1. Find gaps in your target market and fill them

Find the gaps between what people want and what the current market provides, and fill it. Some niches have gaps in community, others in news, still others in how-to, some in quality products.

Develop a Point of Difference.

2. Position yourself to profit from the future

Look at what people will want 5 years in the future as well as what they want now. Mobile tech is big, but not every niche exploits it. Personalisation and web 2.0 saturates some sectors, not others. And how will people interact with your niche next year? The year after that?

3. Look at other, unrelated markets to get ideas

Technology-oriented niches advance and develop faster than non-tech niches, so if you’re involved in a non-tech sector, your involvement and knowledge of trends in the tech world will give you an edge.

Non-tech niches are often good for finding old-school linkbait / promotion ideas - for example, I went to the PetLvr blog and checked out this article - and it immediately gave me ideas on how I could apply the same thing to my Soccerlens.com site in terms of giving buying advice to people looking to buy football shoes and shirts.

(Don’t know whose idea it was, but thank you for that article - it shows how you can target niches at different angles, different stages of the buying process.)

Always, always, find out what people in other niches are doing to promote / monetize / create content, and you’ll learn a lot (and thus stay ahead).

4. Network, network, network

In and around your niche. Be the go-to guy who knows everyone and knows how to get things done. You know you’ve got it made when a TV channel offers you a chance to do a show, or aiming a little lower, when someone hires you to help them build a niche-leading website in your area of expertise.

5. Run your business on a tight leash

Run your business as if you were in debt and had to increase your revenue / cut spending massively to break even. Force yourself to squeeze more money out of your blog than before (keeping your long-term goals in mind) and cut all unnecessary spending. Attach a monetary value to every action. If done right, this will give you more money to reinvest in your business, which, if spent wisely, will help you grow much faster than you would by blindly slapping linkbait on your blog.

6. Learn to admit that you’re wrong

A bit counter-intuitive, perhaps, but massively important. Often, we commit to relationships and bound ourselves to partnerships / deals that we later realise are hurting our chances. You might have made a mistake in hiring that new writer, or in giving that casino site a text link on your site because he paid 5x your asking rate.

When this happens, we need to let go and approach the situation objectively. The sooner we admit that we’ve made a mistake, the quicker we can rectify it.

7. Re-evaluate your processes and goals regularly

If the first step is admitting your mistakes, the second is to re-evaluate what you’re doing today and ask yourself - would you do what you’re doing today, knowing what you know now?

Too often, we keep doing the same things (out of habit) in promoting or monetizing or creating content that we did a few months ago, regardless of the news lessons learned along the way. By admitting that you made some mistakes and that you need to change, you can start implementing new, more productive habits and build more beneficial relationships.

How does this help you become successful? It’s the case of monkey-see, monkey-do. If you copy what others are doing, you soon get stuck in a pattern without understanding how it works. On the other hand, if you can break patterns and learn to innovate (do something different) AND do it better than anyone else, you will immediately gain an advantage over your competition.

8. Understand the lag time in a business

Success requires, amongst other things, lots of momentum. You don’t get to the top by working just one day a week, you do it by working for 7 days a week (even if what you do every day is different). The effort you put in today will repay in spades after a few months - similarly, the time off you take today will hurt your business in a few months, not today.

And it’s a lot easier to keep building momentum than it is to rebuild your momentum after you let it slip. Momentum and consistency is key.

Over to you.

Consider any businessman at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his profits.

Making more money starts with intelligent financial management - and in this article you’ll read 5 steps for your business to make more money:

Step #1 - Get work done for free where possible.

I wrote an article on Performancing on this topic:

Outsource your blogging chores for free

You could apply this to any type of business, not just blogs. It comes to a combination of leveraging the resources available to you and minimizing expenses where possible. By having your customers double as your evangelists, you can reduce expenses and get more work done just by treating your customers the right way.

Step #2 - Monetize NOW, not later

I don’t mean this as advice to slap ads all over your site. Every niche and every website will have a specific model of monetization - whether it’s based on targeted referrals, mass traffic or newsletter / email-list based traffic.

Instead of waiting till - a) things are picture perfect, b) the site is older, c) you have significant traffic or d) whatever other reason you have for holding off on monetization that doesn’t warrant spending money on, you can monetize NOW and start benefiting from your site traffic today instead of some indeterminate point (date on a calendar doesn’t count) in the future.

Selling affiliate products? Setup your account, put in your links and write those reviews. Betting the house on CPM revenues? Put your ads in the right places FIRST, go after traffic later (with the obvious caveat being that you won’t be able to get into some CPM networks without having enough traffic - however, niche ad networks work fine as well, thank you very much).

Monetizing now focuses your efforts on your (at least one of them) end goal(s) - you might not be setting up every blog / business with the intention of making enough to live off on, but more often than not your business is there to feed you, and not the other way around. Without you setting it up and making it ready to make you money, it’s not going to make you any money.

Monetize now, get your structure in place, and then go after traffic knowing that increased traffic will, every day, earn you more money.

Step #3 - Find balance in monetization

More of a warning than a step - sometimes a business becomes over-dependent on one form of revenue or one source of customers. This dependence can have adverse effects on your business (discussed in more detail here) and because of this you need to ensure that your customers and revenue come from a variety of different sources.

Step #4 - Ask for more

Successful entrepreneurs have a habit of getting what they want. This may come as a surprise, but the primary reason they get what they want is because they ask for it in the first place!

Ask your peers for their help - they’ll be more than happy to oblige as long as you help them as well. Ask those working for you to continuously improve their work - even if you have to tie in incentives based on results. If you’re talking to advertisers, ask them to pay a higher price than they’re offering. If you’re providing copywriting services, ask for more than the industry standard.

It’s human nature to give when asked (as long as the one doing the asking poses no threat to the one they’re asking from) - ever noticed that kid in your family who always got more than he deserved, just because he kept asking for more?

As long as you have realistic expectations and you know how to ask, you’ll generally be better off by asking for the moon than staying silent and ‘expecting it’.

Step #5 - Build up capital like your life depends on it

To be brutally honest, it does. At least the quality of life that you’ll be living an year down the road.

Spend money where it’s most needed, invest in things that will give you maximum return and growth for your money. Shun everything else. Streamline your expenses and maximize your earnings. Tighten the belt, and keep it tight while you aggressively build up revenues.

Having money in the bank - whether it is to bail you out of emergencies, for investing back in your business or for buying / starting up new businesses - is perhaps not the most important thing you can have, but it will make your life OH so much easier. In some ways I was lucky to have built up some capital, but in other ways I had spent more in the last 6 months than I should have and that counted at the end.

Building up capital allows you to invest a large amount when needed - it also forces to cut back on unnecessary expenses and increases profitability which is always a nice number to quote to a prospective buyer.

If nothing else, try avoiding the urge to go Amy Winehouse and blow it all up in smoke (I’d have used a Lohan / Hilton reference, but bringing someone’s crack into a discussion on money isn’t — what? oh…).

Building your business and making a future for yourself and your loved ones (if any are left ) is a serious business - treat it with the respect and attention that you feel your life deserves. I know this is simple and foundational stuff, but if you haven’t got this right, you’ll always be under the risk of having it fall down faster than Britney Spears.

Over to you.

Taking any monetization method to its extremes will produce a lopsided business that is overly dependent on one form of conversions. AdSense = niche search traffic. Now you can get that traffic all on one site, or you could be smart and spread the load across several sites and niches. When this is taken too far in the direction of “increasing your options”, it turns your work into below-par cow dung. If you rely too much on AdSense, you become lazy and don’t maximise your revenues / your site’s value in case you want to sell it later on. If you focus too much on AdSense monetization, you put yourself at the risk of depending solely on search traffic. Lose that, and everything else is lost.

Over-dependence on any one thing is stupid. Why blame the tool when the TOOL who’s using it isn’t making the right choices?

It’s the same with CPM-based ads - there you need tons of pageviews and you can easily be sucked into a vortex of diggbaiting the life out of yourself, your blog and your niche (or again, relying overly on search traffic).

On the other side, you have affiliate marketing, selling your services and selling your products (one-time like ebooks or recurring like membership sites). On the surface these are fascinating opportunities which presumably don’t back you into a corner if you’re too reliant on them.

But here’s the thing: you can still have too much of a good thing, no matter how good it is.

Doing only affiliate marketing limits you to specific slice of the buying cycle - you’re not going after the whole niche, which would be the natural growth of a site that goes on to dominate a sub-niche. You’re only going after specific types of readers (search traffic / pushing it to regular readers who are a limited resource in any case). If you go after too many affiliate programs, you’re going to reduce your average amount of successful conversions across the board because you’ll need to sacrifice quality promotion for the ability to promote more products. If you setup too many sites, you’re going in the familiar dog turd direction.

And you still end up missing out on other types of monetization that could plug the gaps that affiliate marketing doesn’t.

Direct ads - again, same as above although the rules change somewhat as it’s harder to simply increase revenues by getting more traffic. To make selling direct ads really effective, you need returning traffic. Mind you, this just makes making money a bit harder, not necessary holier.

Going after selling your own CPC / CPA / CPM / direct advertising instead of using a third-party? You’re going to miss out on the leverage they have (unless you’re the biggest game in the niche, in which case you don’t *need* this because you’ve already done all this).

Selling your time? After a while, you’ll either run out of time or price yourself out of the market to a point where you can’t have significant growth. There’s a ceiling there too, even though most of us are not committed or dedicated enough to reach it (and it’s a difficult thing to do as well).

Selling your products? Too few, and you’re at risk. Too many, and quality issues appear. Push too hard, and you’ll alienate readers. Push too softly? You won’t make a lot of money.

Extremes (and artificial) demands / limitations made on your means of monetization will prevent you from growing your business to its full potential.

Don’t knock AdSense, knock the users who don’t know any better than to achieve balance in their monetization efforts.

There are times though, when believing in yourself turns into rigidity and a blanket refusal to change your way of thinking despite mounting evidence to the contrary right in front of you.

We’ve been right before, so why can’t we be right this time?

Change is the only constant, and as the environment changes around you, you need to adapt ahead of time to take advantage of it.

I attribute this stubbornness to excess self-importance, or in other words, an ego that’s out of control.

A few mistakes I’ve made that can be blamed on this:

Mistake #1: Thinking that having no money is a good thing

Wholly bootstrapping your business - doing everything when you have no money - is an extremely foolish idea. It is far easier (and faster) to pick up a high-value marketing-related skill (linkbaiting counts, so does SEO, so does sales writing, so does blogging - even programming / design can be included here) and work hard at it for an year to build up capital (and a business that you (and your family) can live off) in order to give you some time to spend on your dream project.

I’ve said for a while that I’m a bootstrapper at heart - but I think we mistakenly consider creating a business without money as a good thing, when what we SHOULD be doing is to create a business while wasting as little money as possible. There’s a subtle but very important difference there.

There’s a knock-on effect that comes with going through the extremes of bootstrapping a business. Sometimes, when the cash starts rolling in there’s an impulse to veer completely in the opposite direction and start spending a lot of money on things that are probably not needed or unimportant. Without a strong habit of being financially judicious day in and day out, you won’t be able to get a good handle on your money without trial and error (and it’s not a trial worth putting yourself through).

Mistake #2: Relying on time you don’t have

Don’t count on yourself being superhuman. Don’t even count yourself as being above average. Give yourself as much leeway as possible when factoring in your own contribution (time, effort, etc) in any plan of action. Think you can do something in an 14-hour all-nighter and therefore you’ll leave it for the weekend? Give yourself the whole weekend, 2 if possible.

No, I’m not saying that you should delay / allocate a LOT more time to your projects than necessary. Instead, START EARLY and tackle things in small bits every day. Rely on a force far greater and much more reliable than yourself: momentum.

Mistake #3: Celebrating success by getting lazy

Don’t rest at your current level of success - financial, health or personal relationships - always keep striving for more.

In the rush to feel satisfied with what one has (too much of satisfaction is a bad thing) we tend to take the foot off the gas completely and become stagnant. Trying to keep your business at a steady level - earning the same amount each month - is slow suicide. On the other hand, by continuously pushing yourself to improve you are enabling yourself not only to improve your present condition but also to avoid the curse of stagnation and eventual business suicide (it’s not over-dramatic when the massive traffic spike dies out and your revenues fall back down to pre-boom levels just because you were ‘happy’ with the extra earnings).

Again, don’t rely on your ability to get yourself out of a jam - rely on your momentum to keep you safe from financial disasters and keep pushing, keep evolving, keep expanding.

Some may respond to the above as saying that it’s important to be satisfied at a certain level of success in life - and I agree. Satisfaction with life, beyond a minimum level of financial stability and self-sustenance, is more or less independent of how much money you make.

I’m talking about something different - the desire to continuously evolve and improve (in face of possible stagnation). A business suffers when it coasts along in auto-pilot - the deterioration is often below the surface and invisible until the bubble completely bursts and profits tank.

By making progress and evolution your focus, you can ensure that your business does not self-destruct by being lazy.

Mistake #4: Repeatedly turning down opportunities that could have helped me achieve all my goals

Staying enslaved to ideas because of subconscious hangups like a fear of talking to new people or of dedicating yourself full-time to one business because you’re used to the psychological crutch of having a backup (backups are still important, but in a different way, I’ll talk about this some other time).

I had this theory once (I still do actually) that doing consulting work was at best a short-term method to raise money and at worst a serious time drain that took me further away from my goals. I blame this (or rather, myself) for sabotaging my financial health for the last 4 years. There have been many times that I’ve turned down better-than-decent contracts or backed out of projects because I felt trapped.

Your fears - whether you are aware of them or not - will be the death of you. Again, that’s not over-dramatic if you think back to what you thought you could accomplish 3 years ago and then check with what you’ve done so far right now. Chances are that you’re nowhere where you thought you’d be. Some of you will be ahead, and kudos to you. Most of us will be behind, and, well, it sucks but it’s also our own damned fault.

There are more, but I hope the above makes the point clear - don’t let your sense of self become an obstacle to success. Embrace change at the cost of discomfort, question everything, and for the love of god work for money AND love instead of just for love - it’s not worth it if you have to go days without eating because you ran out of money and you were too proud to ask anyone for help.

Hey, don’t look at me, it has happened, and it does happen. Part of our job is to make sure it doesn’t happen.

You will find different methods to reach this value but ultimately the only valuation that matters is the absolute minimum you are willing to accept and perhaps more importantly, how you live up to this valuation 24 hours a day (and not just when you are getting paid for working).

Refresher Course

Step 1: Stop worrying and start doing.

Step 2: Do more in less time.

That’s it. Get on the right track and stay on it. Value yourself and your time - not only where others are concerned but where you yourself are concerned. Where are you spending most of your time? Why? How does this help you do what you want in life? It doesn’t? Then why are you doing it?

To thine own self be true. Value yourself and remember, you will die.

Bonus link: Get the Zen To Done ebook and apply it to your daily life - a lifesaver if there was ever one to be found online.

Beginners Course

From the 4 hour workweek to freelanceswitch and probably every productivity / make money online resource you’ll see will tell you one way or another to ‘calculate’ how much money you need (expenses plus savings plus emergency funds), then divide it by the hours you’re willing to put in to give you a ‘per hour’ number.

Try this once - if nothing else, it is an excellent first step to prudent financial management. But getting a grasp on the numbers in your life is just the first step - the whole process takes a bit more time and effort.

Step 1: Get a grip on the numbers - your expenses and what your time needs to be worth (at a minimum) for you to meet those expenses.

Step 2: Track your time - what exactly are you doing all day? Keep a time sheet and keep track of every hour spent. Do this for a week and you’ll have a good picture of where 80% of your time is being wasted.

Frankly, this is a pain to do at the beginning, and it doesn’t get any easier after a week of doing this. On the other hand, if you can gain an extra couple of hours each day by the end of the week and maintain that advantage for the rest of the month, that’s almost an extra 2 days you have to put into work. When you calculate what your time is worth, do the match and figure out much more money you can earn per month like this.

Then tell yourself if it’s worth it or not.

Step 3: Slash your expenses to the absolute minimum. Yes, it is possible. No, not everything is necessary, or even desirable. Easy question - will you need this in 15 years? No? Will you die if you don’t buy it? No? Throw it out.

Most people don’t like this step. They like to horde, they like to define themselves by what they own. Fair enough. You can still use this action plan to your advantage, but when your expenses keep rising proportionally to your income, all the hard work you’re putting in will go to waste.

Enough planning, it’s time for action.

Step 4: Do something you’ve always wanted to. Rack your brain and pull out that list of things you’ve always wanted to do, pick the first that is remotely feasible (traveling the world with $20 in your wallet is one thing, but working out every morning or reading a particular book or even making out in a restaurant, all that is doable right now) and just do it.

If you stop here, you’re toast. Done for. Finished. It’s back to the starting line if you fail at this step, so make it a point to succeed. Pick something simple if you’re daunted by the thought of change, but for your own sake, do it.

Step 5: Zen to Done. Buy it. Read it. Apply it.

Step 6: Find your strengths. I’m convinced, despite the nagging voice in my head telling me to do 20 things at the same time, that there are a few simple things that we are really good at. What you do - write, manage accounts, sell candy, etc etc. - is not what you’re good at. All those jobs (or job descriptions, as it were) are just labels for services that are a means to an end, a means to what you’re really good at doing.

This is better explained through examples. I’ll stick to people I know, and you can use this identification process on people you know as well.

Ryan is a doer and a fantastic mobilizer of resources. The fact that he’s built a successful online empire and charges $1000 / hour in consulting has nothing to do with what he knows about online marketing and monetization (he could learn all that over again in a few months) and everything to do with what he’s good at - getting results.

Tim is a master at the art of selling, and perhaps more importantly, at the art of selling himself. Call it charisma if you wish. The man knows how to present ideas in a way that they get accepted and he’s done that fantastically well through his life (and you can see it in action in his book).

Scott has, as he himself says, the knack of picking the right opportunities. It sounds ridiculously simple but then again, that’s what your calling is supposed to be - simple, profound and flexible enough to apply to a number of situations.

One of my strengths is problem solving - knowing what to do when presented with a sticky situation, how to get from A to B, how to translate goals into actionable steps.

I’m not the best at doing - but tell me what you want in life and I’ll tell you how to get it.

Find out what your strengths are - the StrengthsFinder is one good resource (here’s the book) but the way to do this is through long-term introspection and understanding what you’re good at and what you’re not. You need to be strong enough to admit when you’re not good at something but at the same time, perceptive enough to know when you’re better than others at something.

Step 7: Do work that maximizes your strengths. There’s no point in you designing logos in Photoshop all day long if that’s not something you’re good at. Similarly, there’s every reason for you to do work that helps you maximise your strengths. If you’re good at selling yourself, you can use that skill to your advantage in any walk of life, from getting a promotion to landing better-paying projects to writing and promoting a bestselling how-to book.

If you’re good at getting things done, you can use that skill to overdeliver in your projects (and let the results speak for you), you can use that skill to implement someone else’s clear-cut strategy to build a million-dollar online business. If you know how to get things done, the only thing you need is to be pointed in the right direction.

Step 8: Outsource everything else. Surround yourself with people who have strengths that compliment complement yours. If you’re a doer, get sellers and thinkers on board. If you’re a thinker, ally yourself with a doer as quickly as possible. If you’re good at selling, you can be the front man while the doers and thinkers do the hard work behind the scenes. In any case, you’ll get more out of concentrating on your strengths and allying with others than you will by trying to do everything yourself.

Reminder: In all this seriousness, remember to have some fun. When you want to get the maximum possible out of your life, part of it means having a good time as well.

To wrap it up - value yourself, value your time, and get busy living.

Every successful site has a hook to it - something that differentiates them from the competition. Something that elicits the following reaction (quoting Rae Hoffman from her Performancing interview):

“Oh, yeah, widgetworld.com - you guys are the ones who have the [insert something others in that niche aren't doing here]“

A POD is different from the core basics any site should have - quality content, good usability, community value, etc. And here’s where many webmasters trip themselves up - they consider these basics (quality content, community value and personal opinion are the most common) as being a point of difference in themselves.

Let’s be clear - quality is not a point of difference UNLESS you’re working in a very immature and undeveloped niche, where you have little competition and you can establish yourself just by being one of the first and by being good. Even this advantage evaporates quickly once the competition increases.

Personal opinion is rarely a good POD - unless you happen to be very entertaining, very interesting, very popular or very important to a group of people, your opinion isn’t worth squat at the beginning.

For us mere mortals, we need to build a strong track record before we can differentiate based on our ‘opinions’. No, seriously, if you don’t fit in one of the four above categories (if you are, you’ll know because you’ll have people telling you), you really need to find something else.

Community is NOT a POD

Community, like personal opinion, is a factor that develops over time and therefore isn’t a ‘primary’ POD. Startups who emphasize the community aspect take note - unless you’re migrating a whole community from another site / forum (relaunching a forum on a new domain, for example), community is NOT your best selling point. In fact, it’s not even a selling point - if you’re forced to talk about how people can ‘network’ and ’share ideas’, you’re just telling me to get out of my IM and sign up to a new forum. Double the effort in shifting over, not to mention that all my ‘like-minded’ friends aren’t going to be there, so you’re telling me to run two virtual networks of contacts, AND make new friends?

Being First as a Point of Difference

This works best in growing niches - by staking claim in a niche early on (or in a subniche) and building towards being the ‘first in mind’, a webmaster can use ‘being first’ as a POD.

Of course, the catch here is that not only do you need to supplement this advantage with quality, but you also need to stay ahead of the competition in terms of innovation lest someone overtakes you.

Example - Arseblog. One of the earliest blogs on Arsenal FC, and still the first name that comes to mind when you say ‘Arsenal blog’. Once the niche became somewhat saturated, the owner started a weekly podcast as a means to differentiate himself from the competition (the football blogging niche in general is very slow on new tech adoption).

The all-in-one POD

Trying to please all people will not work straight from the start. Unless you have a first-mover advantage, the smartest route to doing this is to focus on being very, very good at one thing before moving on to the next.

And even then, this approach requires an enormous amount of time, energy and money to be successful (unless you play the Wiki-card, and with the number of Wikis popping up, that’s not enough to set you apart in itself).

Kickass PODs

Now that we’ve looked at PODs that don’t always work, here are a few examples of brilliantly-executed PODs:

The PopCrunch Show - In terms of branding, this video show is a masterstroke. It sets PopCrunch apart from the hundreds of celebrity blogs out there, and gives the site a strong POD which they can now use to build their brand.

Matt Cutts - Matt’s smart and knows a lot, but that’s not what got people interested in the first place. His unofficial status as Google’s spokesperson gave him massive initial credibility and a POD that no one else could really match.

SEO Book - Oh, yea, seobook.com, that’s the guy who wrote the book on SEO, right?

What is your Point of Difference?