I now have 2 official man crushes. Don Johnson & Griz Grizzly as Allyn Hane calls him. (Chris Brogan is inching up the list also). No one has seen Griz but the closest sighting came from the Blogger Illustrated video interview series. I just read one of Griz’s latest articles and it struck home with me again. One of his August articles is titled Be A Better Blogger? WTF??
I simply can’t help it but I’m drawn to no-nonsense, no-fluff type writers who give me useful stuff. I consider myself to be well rounded as a reader and I like a little bit of everything. Kind of like music, I like a lot of different music but I’m drawn to certain styles more than others.
I’ve read Griz for a long time and his methods of making money online work. I have tested them and it simply works. Because of that, I’m a fan. I haven’t delved into that world a whole lot yet but I did follow his instructions to a T once and I ranked #1 in 45 days and I’ve been sitting there for almost a year. I make a few bucks every month on Adsense. I did it as an experiment just to see if this Canadian dude was full of $**t. Turns out he wasn’t.
Here is my favorite part of this article that appears near the end. “We don’t target bloggers – we target civilians and provide targeted info to the people actively searching for it online. Our methods worked 5 years ago and still work today and you don’t have to waste time with dumb ass things like Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon or any of the other time sucking social network sites.”
Folks, this is referred to as telling it like it is. You can sugarcoat it any way you want but this is honest talk.
I don’t know what you do online. If you are laying all of your cards on Social Media, IMHO you are going to lose, plain and simple. I really wish it was called “Interactive Media” because I think that term is more correct. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoy Social Media with the ones I interact with. I imagine that out of the 10 people who may read this article, 8 will totally disagree with my statement.
Let me back up the statement I just made with some facts that may open your eyes. Last week I published a Chris Brogan, Trust Interview Spoof. It was just a fun video project and I just had a little fun at Brogan’s expense. I’m a subscriber to Brogan’s RSS feed. Like everyone else, I like some of his reads better than others but he certainly appeals to a very wide audience. I like to keep tabs on the big boys. The hype leading up to his Trust Agent book was staggering on Twitter. Multitudes of people were twittering to go out and buy the book having never read it themselves. This was almost mind blowing to me and a study in marketing 101. I was totally impressed at the sheer genius of it. He should write another book on how he did it. That’s the one I want to read. I would never tell anyone to go and purchase something without zero knowledge on the subject. For that reason, I did not Tweet or Re-Tweet the message that was sweeping the internet. Even the ProBlogger himself touted the book without reading it. All of this gave me the idea to do the spoof.
I will tell you right now, that you will be hard pressed to find anything bad about Chris Brogan. He seems to be a very decent human being, a family man and his life’s work is to help others. Very noble, I respect that and I admire that in a man. He deserves his success and every dime he earns. Apparently Chris’s wife found my video and brought it to Chris’s attention. He liked it and posted it on ChrisBrogan.com. He was a great sport about it and frankly it blew me away. I could not believe it. I appreciated it and made Chris a direct video response, thanking him.
Lets look at my Social Media Traffic as a result of being posted on ChrisBrogan.com. The feedburner widget on Chris’s site shows at this time 29,424 readers. Chris has 94,622 followers on Twitter. I made his blog and Twitter. I made front page on Chris’s site on August 26, 2009. Time to prepare my web host (Bluehost) for a server meltdown right? Time to call youtube and alert them to possible problems resulting from my video being posted right? Wrong.
My traffic stats for the day was 277 visits and 308 views on the video. What does this tell you? It tells me a lot. It tells me if you are spending your time chasing Social Media traffic you may be wasting your time until you build yourself into a Brogan type stature. If you think you are going to make money on Social Media, you may want to revisit your business plan. I think Brogan makes his money with his speaking engagements, books and consulting. I have no first hand knowledge, only making an educated guess. Are you talented enough to speak at conferences? Write a best seller? If not, you better get busy with things that matter and stop wasting time on those things that don’t. You better be prepared for a long haul of paying your dues. I personally don’t feel you can do it with social media as your main focus. What works for Brogan and Vaynerchuk probably will not work for you and me. Only you can decide for yourself where to spend your time for the biggest payoff.
I really like Chris Brogan and I appreciate what he did for me. He will make you feel good about yourself. He is motivational. You should read him and hire him possibly. I wish he would send me his Trust Agent book so I can give it a review.
I have a man crush on Griz. He speaks his mind and he educates me. His information makes me slightly less of an idiot.
Check out these awesome articles while you are here:
Steve,
this is really great insight on your part. Here is what is interesting (and I will be doing a vid on this today) is that when I got front page on Griz, I had a lot more visits that you did being on front page of Brogan. Interesting right? Now, part of it is that Griz gave me a link while Brogan just jacked your vid…. meaning people did not need to visit your site to see you when the vid was there, however, you still only got 308 views… Hmmmmm…
Later today I will show you exactly why that is like that… stay tuned.
AL
@Allyn (my video blog mentor) I was hoping you would see this article and I knew you could offer insight. I made sure I put the video stats up also because I knew that many would not visit my site.
I’m looking forward to todays new video. Show me the light brother!!
[...] a Better Blog and then concluded today from a post by my bud Steve over at Blogger Lens called I have a Man Crush On Griz. (Steve also did the vid intro you will see below with the sea turtle [...]
Great timing of the two live examples of worthless social media gurus vs. real social media gurus. Like taking advice from an infomercial financial expert but overlooking the millionaire next door all the people on the block miss. The flash in the pan stuff is fun to watch and great to look at but ultimately dies quick.
Josh, with a comment like that, I may have a man crush on you too. My kind of guy. Thanks for stopping by.
The quicker people can stop chasing their tail online and focus on building a real foundation the better off they’ll be. All of the successful people on and offline usually got their by building whatever over time. Be weary of the ones that try to sell you on anything else because their own examples prove their rhetoric wrong. Case in point John Chow, he’s been blogging for years and attending every expo possible. A noob might look at him and think they can do it overnight, perhaps JC tries to sell them a bit on that idea. But in the end it all comes back to elbow grease.
Steve, do you keep your crush for Don Johnson and the crush for Griz Grizzly in the same folder, or are they filed under different categories?
To me Griz is kind of like way cooler than Don Johnson. I admire Griz’s brain and thinking, and I can’t say I ever really had thoughts like that about Don Johnson.
@JL It’s like this. Don Johnson got my man-crush cherry back in the day. You never forget your first one. Don Johnson has never made me any coin however. As I have aged and become more secure with my man crushes, I added Griz on my short list. Griz teaches how to make coin and is a severely blunt Canadian who tells it like it is. That to me is a huge man-crush turn on. Because I am a certified bad-ass, others may now feel more comfortable coming out publicly with their man-crushes too. I am publicly calling all bad-asses to reveal their man crushes. C’mon JL, who is yours?
Haha. No man2man crushes for this girl.
Intellect and the use of it is what I enjoy, something Vic-Griz-Court all have in common. They’re all smart cookies.
@JL, amen to that.
I switched my time that I spent on social media, twitter, facebook etc, to writing articles on Infobarrel and Hubpages. I have already seen a significant increase in my earnings.
I still check my facebook, but maybe only once a day or so. I also changed my rss subscriptions to Griz and his friends, and it is a nice little community (oh, can I call it a community?)
To all participating in this comment thread: Would copyblogger.com fall into this category of bullshit? Ha, because it seems like every post over there falls into the category of ‘fluff’ posts. By fluff I mean posts that just spew out some ambiguous ‘blogging strategies’ like “cut to the chase” or “you gotta know when to wrap things up”. Each post follows this same repetitive groove – the only difference is they try to pick some new quirky metaphor + a new quirky image to go along with each post.
The ppl leaving comments seem like total suck ups. About every comment contains generic praise to the author. Then, when I follow the link to their blog, I find their own repetition of this or that about rising to blogging greatness.
Of all the beefs I could have with Chris Brogan what I find lame are profile pics. They’re shot in a studio with all this crafty lighting casting suave hues over his face. LAME and egotistical if you ask me. Grizzly and his frozen wilderness – now we’re talking down to earthness.
y/n?
@Mike Smart strategy. I may build a few hubpages today myself.
@Anon Like Allyn says, sucky sucky. I’m sure that some would put Copyblogger into the same category. You may want to check out Lis Sowerbutts article on the Copyblogger. http://lissowerbutts.com/teaching-sells-does-it-work/. One heck of a discussion going on as Lis called out the Copyblogger. Over 80 comments thus far.
Yup. Ha, that basically answers my question. Good read too, thanks. I think I’m fortunate in that I actually do my writing under the eye of my boss, who founded the website I work for years ago. The writing part is pretty easy and straightforward for me (and due to the kind of site it is). What I really enjoy is being able to look at all the analytics, traffic sources, adsense revenue etc because we get over a million page views per month. I don’t think people looking to start making money online have under the hood access to such things.
Is it really true? I haven’t really examined if that is true, I mean about the social bookmarking stuff? Is it all BS? Am I just wasting my time with all that BS? thanks Steve.