tony_d
Elite Member
- Jun 22, 2013
- 2,673
- 3,294
TLDR; The only thing that we as humans can do is project our beliefs upon the world, and consider them reality. This becomes a problem for the world if those views are ill-formed.
If John Citizen, a newbie internet marketer, tries to rank a site with 100k blog comments bought on Fiverr, and fails to rank top 3 most instantly, he'll start to believe that SEO 'doesn't work'. By the time he does one or two additional silly things, he'll be absolutely convinced that SEO doesn't work. That wouldn't be a problem if he kept that view to himself - the problem starts when he accrues a few hundred posts on a forum (and therefore, quasi-credibility) and starts replying to other unsuspecting newbies with 'the facts' that SEO doesn't work, OR that PBN's don't work, OR whatever poorly executed half-assed failure he ran in the days before arriving at that conclusion 'doesn't work'.
Likewise, on the other side of the coin, there would probably be a group of people that try to inflate their image with successes that they haven't had, and claim that XYZ worked for them, when in fact they never even got out of bed that day.
If only for the distribution of personality types in the world in general, it seems more likely than not that a very large portion of members posting on web forums aren't actually successful in their field - whether it be photography, shoe polishing, or internet marketing.
What does this all mean? It means that in my view, the single toughest thing about SEO and IM is deciding which opinions and statements to take seriously, and which opinions and purported 'facts' should be disregarded. To compound the problem further, I'd be pretty comfortable suggesting that a few large search engines have at least one or two people dedicating solely to spreading misinformation on forums.
Indeed if I distilled the issue by a further degree, I would arrive at the conclusion that the single worst thing any IM'er can do is to take 'the words of the web' as fact, when instead they should spend their time and effort testing, experimenting, and failing as many times as they can possibly fail. That, folks, is what leads to endurance in the game of IM, and I suspect that's also the reason why the great majority of IM'ers crash and burn quickly - because it actually does require effort, experimentation, and failure before one succeeds, and it's not actually about posting on a forum and asking for a 'method that will earn $x in the next Y days'.
Seth Godin wisely says words to the effect of: fail fast, and fail often.
If John Citizen, a newbie internet marketer, tries to rank a site with 100k blog comments bought on Fiverr, and fails to rank top 3 most instantly, he'll start to believe that SEO 'doesn't work'. By the time he does one or two additional silly things, he'll be absolutely convinced that SEO doesn't work. That wouldn't be a problem if he kept that view to himself - the problem starts when he accrues a few hundred posts on a forum (and therefore, quasi-credibility) and starts replying to other unsuspecting newbies with 'the facts' that SEO doesn't work, OR that PBN's don't work, OR whatever poorly executed half-assed failure he ran in the days before arriving at that conclusion 'doesn't work'.
Likewise, on the other side of the coin, there would probably be a group of people that try to inflate their image with successes that they haven't had, and claim that XYZ worked for them, when in fact they never even got out of bed that day.
If only for the distribution of personality types in the world in general, it seems more likely than not that a very large portion of members posting on web forums aren't actually successful in their field - whether it be photography, shoe polishing, or internet marketing.
What does this all mean? It means that in my view, the single toughest thing about SEO and IM is deciding which opinions and statements to take seriously, and which opinions and purported 'facts' should be disregarded. To compound the problem further, I'd be pretty comfortable suggesting that a few large search engines have at least one or two people dedicating solely to spreading misinformation on forums.
Indeed if I distilled the issue by a further degree, I would arrive at the conclusion that the single worst thing any IM'er can do is to take 'the words of the web' as fact, when instead they should spend their time and effort testing, experimenting, and failing as many times as they can possibly fail. That, folks, is what leads to endurance in the game of IM, and I suspect that's also the reason why the great majority of IM'ers crash and burn quickly - because it actually does require effort, experimentation, and failure before one succeeds, and it's not actually about posting on a forum and asking for a 'method that will earn $x in the next Y days'.
Seth Godin wisely says words to the effect of: fail fast, and fail often.
