Morpho Designs

Smoking the Information Pipe

October 14th, 2009 | by Mitchell Allen |

Photo by j o rdan

It has been fashionable to equate intense experiences with crack cocaine.
That is twisted, perverse and sooo effective.
So move outa my way as I jump on the crack-as-metaphor bandwagon.
I am finally admitting that I am an information junkie.
Not your garden-variety World News/TechCrunch/Digg-type information (NTTAWWT!)
No, I go for two types of information:

• Arcane and ridiculously trivial
• How do “They” make it seem so easy?

I’m sure I don’t have a monopoly on seeking arcane trivia like, “How do coaches encrypt base-stealing signs?” It’s just that I obsess over it until someone at the computer Googles it to shut me up!

As for the second category, I am just like every other marketer who is trying to improve his or her skills. I marvel at the various Internet Marketing blogs that appear to be very successful (I only have their word for that, you know!)
Although there are obvious answers – find a niche, feeding the starving crowd, offer valuable content – still, I wonder just what separates Internet Marketers into strata that range from Fake Gurus to quiet multimillionaires.

One way I keep the pipe full is by using Google Alerts. It is great when I just need a quick hit.
I use RSS feeds too but, for reasons that will soon become clear, RSS usually winds up in the sock drawer.

Another thing, I subscribe to countless email lists. If I’m keeping it real, I would have to say that this addictive habit stems from my roots as an opportunistic wanderer.

I just don’t want to miss the latest thing. I no longer chase everything, but I do succumb to a few wacky ideas now and then.

While a good 90% of the email subscriptions are a waste of my time, I have discovered some interesting people. Within a month, I can’t remember anything about their newsletter, but they leave an impression on me.
If I decide, like now, to write about them, I have to pull out the pipe and smoke them out.*

That won’t happen with Tinu Abayomi-Paul. I was reading an eBook from Marlon Sanders. He mentioned something called Evergreen Traffic and linked to it. The link led me to a sales page that claimed that she is the Queen of Free Traffic.

No, Really.

Screen shot of http://trafficreality.com/evergreen/

I never did finish the sales letter because I had to see for myself. I typed in free traffic tips, clicked on her website and got hooked.
Here is the headline that fried the synapses and got the dopamine flooding my brain:

The article is fantastic reading, hitting points about RSS in a way I had never seen before:

The book I wrote on RSS in 2005 years ago should not still be relevant today. We’re too “close” to RSS. It should be two degrees from us, just like web pages are two degrees from us, via things like search, visual editors, and the web browser. Email is two degrees from us, via the online or offline mail client, filtering, spam-catching technology, and whatever the compose email button does that makes me able to write an email without knowing anything about mail headers. RSS is still one degree from us. And that’s too close. There’s no just add water element to the use of RSS in our daily lives as publishers, or as consumers. If I want the headlines of another site, I have to know what an RSS feed is, so I can find it and add it to my reader, even if I use Google Reader. If I’m a publisher and I want people to know about my RSS feed, I have to know all the steps of implementation. And yet if I want people to know I have a website, all I need to say is “www blahblahblah dot com”.

All hype aside, this article is the type of proof I need that a person knows what she is writing about. You figure that there is a reason we take to one technology and not to another. Most of the time, we blame ourselves, rather than the underlying technology. So, I enjoyed a sense of vindication vis-à-vis my burgeoning feed reader.

Tinu’s blog does something else. It satisfies my thirst for “How Do They Do It” – for now. After all, it focuses only on one piece of the Internet Marketer’s puzzle: how to get free traffic.

Photo by J.J. Verhoef

You know how people love to say, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you”?
Well, I like to believe that, just because the lower stratum of Internet Marketing is polluted with bovine methane by-products, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a breath of fresh air in the upper layers. I just hope I don’t rot my lungs during the long journey.

---

* One of these interesting people, Scott Boulch, wrote about a slew of other interesting people.
I couldn’t complete this post until I had dug up where I had found those folks.
The interesting people, including Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame, can be found on page 33 of this free e-book (my affiliate link):

It’s stuff like this that keeps me from dumping all my email subscriptions.