The key word to SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the word "optimization". If you look at optimization as an end point, it involves copious amounts of details and nuances. If you look at optimization as a process -- a never ending destination -- Then you only need to focus on constantly improving. The process of optimization involves constant and never-ending improvements. Split testing should at least be considered as a strategy
So how specifically do you skyrocket your search engine traffic from SEO?
There are two types of SEO; internal, and external.
Internal SEO is about your end of it. The website itself, the formatting, reducing and eliminating format errors, avoiding penalties from bad practices, a pleasurable experience for your users, relevant content, efficient site speed, integration with mobile, w3 validator to optimize and correct coding errors, using cache and other strategies to increase site speed, utilizing multimedia and tags, correct siloing (WordPress usually does this automatically if you select relevant categories and tags), and everything else. Inbound anchoring and texts, relevancy of outbound and inbound links to the topic. Quality of the outbound websites you link to, authority and link juice (influenced largely by external SEO to your specific pages and home page) of your own site's pages that link inbound to your own pages. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or using related vocabulary to the subject matter and so on.
External SEO is a little over rated but it is what a lot of people focus on. Basically it's about getting links from external places to link back to you. You can branch out and post at article directories and guest blogging or you can focus on marketing strategy or even blog commnt. A marketing strategy for External SEO is designed to get people to spread your link. It is also about trying to control anchor text to organically match the content without "over optimizing". In other words, not spamming anchor text to boost search engine ranking. This can also be stated as "natural link building".
The best way to SEO in my opinion is to focus on the user and focus on a marketing campaign almost as if the search engine didn't exist. The search engine algorithms are gradually going to be adjusted to improve the experience of the user so focus on that end point. If you get SEO traffic you should look at it as a bonus and natural consequence of doing things right. However, there are exceptions. Since Google wants a positive experience for the user, this means headlines should appear to be pleasing to the user which means headline grabbers provided you don't disappoint. A combination of on page SEO AND writing good headlines is very important. The other exception is viral marketing campaigns and strategies designed to get people to link to you. Holding contests for example is a good way to get people to improve backlinks once you have developed some traffic.
The click through rate and bounce rate plays a role. If Google is showing a lot of impression of your web page and you aren't getting them to click through to your web page, you probably need to optimize your headline more for attention and less for search engines. Market to humans and select a good, marketable headline, but make things easy for the search engine too. Use your keyword in the headline and consider using it in different formats or related terms in different formats without spamming. appropriate italicized, bold, headers, quotations and so on might have a mild effect provided you aren't keyword stuffing. If people are clicking away immediately after viewing your website it is not a good experience for the user so you probably need to work on that.
Ultimately you need a process that over time helps you narrow down what's important. A lot of times you aren't going to have any idea why some posts get 3,000 views and other posts get 56 viewers. So the process of testing lots of things and doing more of what appears to be working and less of what doesn't until you can conclusively determine A is better than B is a good strategy. That requires doing a lot of stuff and seeing what is successful and repeatedly trying to recreate your success. That means tinkering with new headlines but very similar content/topics, similar headlines but different topics, similar backlinking strategy but other different things and so on. If you can conclusively determine based upon your many tests which variable had more success you can try that moving forward. As you do this more and more you can focus on detail.
The point is you need to have a process of constant improvement. When you don't know how to improve things you can simply try a bunch of new stuff until the direction sorts itself out through this process.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Friday, December 2, 2016
How To Elict Emotional Responses To Influence - Awesome!
There's a very strange mental bias that allows palm readers and psychics and truism to flourish. The mind tends to look for "hits" rather than "misses" and also tends to focus on what has been mentioned most recently. It's a combination of recency bias and confirmation bias.
For example, if I ask you if you feel happy today or think past the sale and ask you to what degree do you feel happy today, you have to access all of the mental associations of the word "happy" which probably will at least somewhat trigger an imaginary representation of what it means and may in fact trigger more happy feelings. If I ask you the opposite, you can imagine less positive emotions.
If a palm reader one day says that you tend to be lazy, you will think of all the instances in which that characterization may fit you. If he comes back later and talks about how there are times in which you are tenacious and persistent you will tend to think of the times in which you were persistent or work ethic.
A very high percentage of people responding to specific lines of questioning will say yes.
The only way to really try to reduce bias when asking a question is to say "how happy OR unhappy are you" "how lazy or persistent are you. Or perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being lazy and 10 being active would you describe yourself.
But if you can accidentally create a response bias, you can intentionally create it through the understanding.
Open endeed pictures and stories that would make someone feel in a particular way can elicit an emotional response.
If you ask someone "do you consider yourself useful?" they will answer yes, by which you can then ask them if they would mind doing something useful for just a minute then proceed to try to promote your charity or ask them to create a survey. You can ask them if they feel helpful or adventurous as well, the key is having your request being consistent with the question.
This is one key aspect to PRE-suade as mentioned by Robert Cialdini in his book PRE-suasion.
You can also elicit a negative emotional response just before you present the solution to alleviate that negative emotion. (Humans tend to seek to avoid pain more than they seek pleasure.)
One of the problem with negative emotions is you don't want to associate it with your product or brand itself. It's not a good long term strategy to "fearmonger", but it can influence on a short term basis if you contrast it with a positive emotion and somewhere in the headline use phrasing that suggests the content will negative and then contrast it with a positive. Additionally, people may just click away from your site. SO you have to put it in context, not dwell on it, and convince them that you're going to teach them a technique that will bring positive emotions like amusement, joy, laughter, etc. That you will bring them a bright future. There's also liability risks of promising to relieve pain so you don't want to oversell this point directly. It's just one of many useful tools of persuasion to add to the toolbox.
source:https://www.quicksprout.com/2016/11/23/6-neuromarketing-hacks-for-maximum-content-impact/
Story telling with imagery combined with descriptive but open ended words that elicit responses is a great way to induce an emotional state, from which you can then use to lead.
Please be responsible with these tools.
It's useful to inspire people to be better versions of themselves. Be useful and responsible.
For example, if I ask you if you feel happy today or think past the sale and ask you to what degree do you feel happy today, you have to access all of the mental associations of the word "happy" which probably will at least somewhat trigger an imaginary representation of what it means and may in fact trigger more happy feelings. If I ask you the opposite, you can imagine less positive emotions.
If a palm reader one day says that you tend to be lazy, you will think of all the instances in which that characterization may fit you. If he comes back later and talks about how there are times in which you are tenacious and persistent you will tend to think of the times in which you were persistent or work ethic.
A very high percentage of people responding to specific lines of questioning will say yes.
The only way to really try to reduce bias when asking a question is to say "how happy OR unhappy are you" "how lazy or persistent are you. Or perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being lazy and 10 being active would you describe yourself.
But if you can accidentally create a response bias, you can intentionally create it through the understanding.
Open endeed pictures and stories that would make someone feel in a particular way can elicit an emotional response.
If you ask someone "do you consider yourself useful?" they will answer yes, by which you can then ask them if they would mind doing something useful for just a minute then proceed to try to promote your charity or ask them to create a survey. You can ask them if they feel helpful or adventurous as well, the key is having your request being consistent with the question.
This is one key aspect to PRE-suade as mentioned by Robert Cialdini in his book PRE-suasion.
You can also elicit a negative emotional response just before you present the solution to alleviate that negative emotion. (Humans tend to seek to avoid pain more than they seek pleasure.)
One of the problem with negative emotions is you don't want to associate it with your product or brand itself. It's not a good long term strategy to "fearmonger", but it can influence on a short term basis if you contrast it with a positive emotion and somewhere in the headline use phrasing that suggests the content will negative and then contrast it with a positive. Additionally, people may just click away from your site. SO you have to put it in context, not dwell on it, and convince them that you're going to teach them a technique that will bring positive emotions like amusement, joy, laughter, etc. That you will bring them a bright future. There's also liability risks of promising to relieve pain so you don't want to oversell this point directly. It's just one of many useful tools of persuasion to add to the toolbox.
Story telling with imagery combined with descriptive but open ended words that elicit responses is a great way to induce an emotional state, from which you can then use to lead.
Please be responsible with these tools.
It's useful to inspire people to be better versions of themselves. Be useful and responsible.
The Secret, Powerful Way How To Grow An Online Business Empire
There are secrets involving successful skill development, specifically SEO, persuasion and time management that will skyrocket your chances of success. There is a clear path to learning that will lead to success. You certainly can imagine putting forth work towards your knowledge if it would double your chances of success, yes?
That's the reality of developing skills. If you can stack skills on top of each other, each time you double your rate of success. At least that's the useful rule of thumb that is approximately true. Just saying it's "useful" doesn't inspire continuous action and self-improvement, saying it doubles does.
But as you make the plan to learn, you will gradually begin to enjoy learning more and find more value in it. Finding value in your knowledge requires action, but knowledge is capable of inspiring more action, and you can certainly find yourself more inspired by this fact, can't you.
So if you could get in a kayak and let the stream take you where you want to go, learning is the vehicle (the kayak or raft), and the topic is like the river. The river itself you choose is important, but getting started and making sure you're always on a journey in the right direction is equally, if not more important.
The topic of SEO and marketing is a combination of skills stacked up on top of each other, just like persuasion.
If you can publish good content, have good work ethic, generate attention, inspire others to link, manage websites, understand coding or selecting the right content management source, understand how to incorporate multimedia, convert files, re-purpose content, video marketing, viral marketing and use resources like article directories, other directories, forums, programming, press releases... you probably possess several skills that will make doing SEO much easier.
If you don't know those skills, you can relax as you can just as easily learn those skills as well.
Persuasion is a combination of word phrasing, influence, psychology, reading people, conversation, story telling, and so on.
If I were to want to learn SEO, my top source would be Neil Patel who has several blogs on the topic. He has the Neil Patel blog, as well as the quicksprout blog and crazy egg.
He is fantastic on the topic and has several guides published that are great, particularly the ones on the sidebar of the quicksprout blog.
I suggest getting started with a single guide and following it as you read along.
On the topic of self improvement and skill development, I'd give Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferris, Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy a look.
On the topic of persuasion, Scott Adams has a good persuasion reading list. but if you want just one book, consider Robert Cialdini's book PRE-Suasion.
When certain events align, I am going to basically be going through a massive amount of material and spending a ton of time cramming information while at the same time using that information where possible so that I'm not just learning, I'm actually practicing.
Experience is the best way to learn, which means use what you learn as a guide, but ultimately you will have to do lots of things and move away from the things that don't seem to work as well and journey towards the types of things that do work well.
Imagine you've created a blog on a topic.
You've optimized your site for speed which includes selecting the right webhost and all the technical things of using content delivery network and a wordpress caching plugin combined with the right settings and optimizing the theme and coding for speed.
You've created excellent content on your web page itself.
You've followed along the guides to growing your blog audience and link building and SEO.
The key is to repeat this effort with lots of different topics and keywords and blogs and see which one performs the best in terms of traffic per hour spent (or dollars spent plus the value of your time for actually outsourcing if you chose to outsourced everything) and then repeat the things that work well. What worked well a year ago probably still will be useful, but may not be optimal. The only way to know for sure is to gain experience and constantly test.
Not only that, but repeated action allows your brain to form habits which allows you to do things more efficiently and automatically. In other words, you will get better and faster at getting a new site to the point of development of the old site with all things being equal. All things won't be equal since you will be trying new topics but in terms of actual production as well as the average speed to a certain metric of success you can be confident that improvement is the natural state given effort, time and repetition.
Once you have the best topic from the list of options you've provided yourself, it's time to make several websites on the topic and test different approaches. From those trial approaches you focus on the one that works the best initially.
Now you can get into more depth and more thoroughly develop web traffic once you've found something successful in the beginning that ideally also aligns with your values and intent and motivations.
Growing a business is about access to visitors first, monetization second. Ultimately though views alone aren't perhaps the best litmus test, they're just an efficient start. Views are a good initial standard to focus your effort one something that is measurably better with the least amount of work. Another standard might look at the total search views of the most general part of your topic possible and see what percentage you capture by dividing your monthly views by the total amount searched. You also may look at what advertisers are willing to pay per click on the subject and just assume a 2% click through rate and based upon your share, project earnings and compare.
Nevertheless, once you have focused efforts proportional to the expected rate of success, you then want to seek earnings by monetization. You can test different methods for the site getting the most views and then rather than put a ton of effort testing monetization of different sites that don't have a ton of views, just copy the most successful of the tested efforts on one topic for all the others.
Once you have a "per view" earnings, you then project the estimated earnings during the test period by multiplying the views during the test period (so all subjects are on equal footing). If you make more projected earnings during the test period or nearly as much, you probably want to spend a little more time optimizing and working on the original subject that you dismissed. Otherwise you probably want to sell off your other websites and let someone else spend their time trying to improve. You can use your money towards what matters the most and generates the most earnings per unit of your time or another standard like growth.
Only the experience of actually going through this stuff is going to allow you to know what works best for your efforts.
There is a massive amount of time that you are going to have to invest working for nothing to very little initially. But the wright brothers worked tirelessly developing a plane that would glide rather than an engine. Once they found out what glided a very lightweight, not so powerful engine was able to fly very well. Meanwhile others who failed had extremely powerful engine but poor design. The moral of the story is not to try to power through a method which won't make much money by putting too much energy behind it. Focus on the right directional aim and maximization per unit of time and THEN power forward with intense focus on what works the best and you'll practically glide your way into success without much effort required.
Of course along the way you'll get better and you'll have more time to test other things again and again.
My journey will hopefully look something like this.
1)Select a few subjects to write about intelligently (TBD)
2)Read and implement guides, creating several websites, one for each subject.
3)Track views and create several more websites on the subject that worked best.
4)Test several methods for that same subject and actually try earning.
5)Apply the best earning methods per time spent on the initial "failures" and compare results through projection of equal effort.
6)Consolidate and focus efforts on the best use of your time. (Potentially sell existing websites)
7)Create additional split tests and continue to work on it.
8)Put a large amount of effort into the focused topic.
9)Repeat, testing the new subjects against the initial controlled experiments, and possibly bring forward the next best topic of all tests if you don't find a new topic or methodology that works better than the first. If you sold it you can start again on the same topic, and in the future don't sell a website that reaches this threshold of results or above but sell everything else below unless you find it difficult to match another in which case you can redefine the threshold for the 3rd best subject after 3 series of testing and so on... Or you may choose to sell all but your second best result knowing you may go back to it later.
10)Work on additional development of skills and implementation and continue learning as you repeat the processes.
That's the reality of developing skills. If you can stack skills on top of each other, each time you double your rate of success. At least that's the useful rule of thumb that is approximately true. Just saying it's "useful" doesn't inspire continuous action and self-improvement, saying it doubles does.
But as you make the plan to learn, you will gradually begin to enjoy learning more and find more value in it. Finding value in your knowledge requires action, but knowledge is capable of inspiring more action, and you can certainly find yourself more inspired by this fact, can't you.
So if you could get in a kayak and let the stream take you where you want to go, learning is the vehicle (the kayak or raft), and the topic is like the river. The river itself you choose is important, but getting started and making sure you're always on a journey in the right direction is equally, if not more important.
The topic of SEO and marketing is a combination of skills stacked up on top of each other, just like persuasion.
If you can publish good content, have good work ethic, generate attention, inspire others to link, manage websites, understand coding or selecting the right content management source, understand how to incorporate multimedia, convert files, re-purpose content, video marketing, viral marketing and use resources like article directories, other directories, forums, programming, press releases... you probably possess several skills that will make doing SEO much easier.
If you don't know those skills, you can relax as you can just as easily learn those skills as well.
Persuasion is a combination of word phrasing, influence, psychology, reading people, conversation, story telling, and so on.
If I were to want to learn SEO, my top source would be Neil Patel who has several blogs on the topic. He has the Neil Patel blog, as well as the quicksprout blog and crazy egg.
He is fantastic on the topic and has several guides published that are great, particularly the ones on the sidebar of the quicksprout blog.
I suggest getting started with a single guide and following it as you read along.
On the topic of self improvement and skill development, I'd give Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferris, Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy a look.
On the topic of persuasion, Scott Adams has a good persuasion reading list. but if you want just one book, consider Robert Cialdini's book PRE-Suasion.
When certain events align, I am going to basically be going through a massive amount of material and spending a ton of time cramming information while at the same time using that information where possible so that I'm not just learning, I'm actually practicing.
Experience is the best way to learn, which means use what you learn as a guide, but ultimately you will have to do lots of things and move away from the things that don't seem to work as well and journey towards the types of things that do work well.
Imagine you've created a blog on a topic.
You've optimized your site for speed which includes selecting the right webhost and all the technical things of using content delivery network and a wordpress caching plugin combined with the right settings and optimizing the theme and coding for speed.
You've created excellent content on your web page itself.
You've followed along the guides to growing your blog audience and link building and SEO.
The key is to repeat this effort with lots of different topics and keywords and blogs and see which one performs the best in terms of traffic per hour spent (or dollars spent plus the value of your time for actually outsourcing if you chose to outsourced everything) and then repeat the things that work well. What worked well a year ago probably still will be useful, but may not be optimal. The only way to know for sure is to gain experience and constantly test.
Not only that, but repeated action allows your brain to form habits which allows you to do things more efficiently and automatically. In other words, you will get better and faster at getting a new site to the point of development of the old site with all things being equal. All things won't be equal since you will be trying new topics but in terms of actual production as well as the average speed to a certain metric of success you can be confident that improvement is the natural state given effort, time and repetition.
Once you have the best topic from the list of options you've provided yourself, it's time to make several websites on the topic and test different approaches. From those trial approaches you focus on the one that works the best initially.
Now you can get into more depth and more thoroughly develop web traffic once you've found something successful in the beginning that ideally also aligns with your values and intent and motivations.
Growing a business is about access to visitors first, monetization second. Ultimately though views alone aren't perhaps the best litmus test, they're just an efficient start. Views are a good initial standard to focus your effort one something that is measurably better with the least amount of work. Another standard might look at the total search views of the most general part of your topic possible and see what percentage you capture by dividing your monthly views by the total amount searched. You also may look at what advertisers are willing to pay per click on the subject and just assume a 2% click through rate and based upon your share, project earnings and compare.
Nevertheless, once you have focused efforts proportional to the expected rate of success, you then want to seek earnings by monetization. You can test different methods for the site getting the most views and then rather than put a ton of effort testing monetization of different sites that don't have a ton of views, just copy the most successful of the tested efforts on one topic for all the others.
Once you have a "per view" earnings, you then project the estimated earnings during the test period by multiplying the views during the test period (so all subjects are on equal footing). If you make more projected earnings during the test period or nearly as much, you probably want to spend a little more time optimizing and working on the original subject that you dismissed. Otherwise you probably want to sell off your other websites and let someone else spend their time trying to improve. You can use your money towards what matters the most and generates the most earnings per unit of your time or another standard like growth.
Only the experience of actually going through this stuff is going to allow you to know what works best for your efforts.
There is a massive amount of time that you are going to have to invest working for nothing to very little initially. But the wright brothers worked tirelessly developing a plane that would glide rather than an engine. Once they found out what glided a very lightweight, not so powerful engine was able to fly very well. Meanwhile others who failed had extremely powerful engine but poor design. The moral of the story is not to try to power through a method which won't make much money by putting too much energy behind it. Focus on the right directional aim and maximization per unit of time and THEN power forward with intense focus on what works the best and you'll practically glide your way into success without much effort required.
Of course along the way you'll get better and you'll have more time to test other things again and again.
My journey will hopefully look something like this.
1)Select a few subjects to write about intelligently (TBD)
2)Read and implement guides, creating several websites, one for each subject.
3)Track views and create several more websites on the subject that worked best.
4)Test several methods for that same subject and actually try earning.
5)Apply the best earning methods per time spent on the initial "failures" and compare results through projection of equal effort.
6)Consolidate and focus efforts on the best use of your time. (Potentially sell existing websites)
7)Create additional split tests and continue to work on it.
8)Put a large amount of effort into the focused topic.
9)Repeat, testing the new subjects against the initial controlled experiments, and possibly bring forward the next best topic of all tests if you don't find a new topic or methodology that works better than the first. If you sold it you can start again on the same topic, and in the future don't sell a website that reaches this threshold of results or above but sell everything else below unless you find it difficult to match another in which case you can redefine the threshold for the 3rd best subject after 3 series of testing and so on... Or you may choose to sell all but your second best result knowing you may go back to it later.
10)Work on additional development of skills and implementation and continue learning as you repeat the processes.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
"Now Announcing My Remarkable Headline: Influencial & Persuasive!"
Introducing My Journey In marketing, Persuasion, SEO
Plus Attention Grabbing, Traffic Gathering Tactics
To My Loyal Blog Reader, (If you are not now, you can imagine yourself as one, right?)
The topic of persuasion and influence is an important one. This blog is a journey to teach my loyal viewers the power of influence through various means.
As you can probably tell from the over the top headline and subheadline, a good headline can help to grab attention.
In the internet age, it's often a battle for attention. But attention is only half the battle. A big portion of persuasion that is overlooked is to PRE-suade. In other words, PRIME the viewer for confirmation bias.
For example, in the headline I used the word now which implies taking some kind of action. I used the word announcing implying some kind of important announcement that you probably don't want to miss. I used descriptive words like remarkable, influential and persuasive in describing my headline. These prime you to believe that the headline is, so that the people that do click believe it's the reason they clicked. (it is at least partly responsible for why you are here).
If it had been another headline, you probably wouldn't think too much about it. You were looking for something, you happened to choose to click, and you probably would have clicked anyways, at least in your rational mind.
But since the headline primed you, you are intent on seeing the message's "importance", you are also more likely to be convinced that headlines are important, and that this particular headline is influential and persuasive (afterall, you did click on the article, right?)
It's also useful to know that many headlines have been tested and certain words test better than others on average at converting clicks and buyers. Words like "Remarkable", "Announcing", "Magic", "Introducing", "Startling", "Revolutionary", "Miraculous", "quick", "easy", "free", "special offer" and time related terms like "hurry" or "last chance" and "negative" words like "You'll Miss Out", "loss", "mistakes", etc.
I used both Remarkable and announcing.
A headline must serve more purpose than marketers will tell you. If it doesn't prime the customer or potential customer, it doesn't necessarily do a lot of good just because it tested well in the past. It just happens that a lot of those words tend to both prime AND attract attention.
The mind is always looking for patterns to confirm things. By placing attention on an idea, the mind is actively looking to confirm that idea and it will rationalize anything that could even be confused as evidence as confirmation.
You'll notice that I addressed the message to my Loyal reader and suggested that you imagine that you are. The mind doesn't distinguish between real and imagined events, so the idea that you can imagine yourself as one primes you so that when I suggest bookmarking or signing up to my newsletter, or adding this site to your regular readers, add me on social media or whatever, you have been primed to act in a way consistent with the label to confirm the suggestion and maintain self-consistency.
Even adding "right?" after a suggestion is a confirmation bias "trap". Rather than asking you if you can imagine yourself as one, I first suggested you can, then added, "right"? People tend not to want to be disagreeable (if they are there's a separate strategy).. They also rely on recent information to confirm. The mere repeated suggestion that I was addressing loyal readers and then suggesting you imagine that I'm speaking to you as a loyal reader (after I called you one), then asking for you to confirm what I just repeated creates enough of a suggestion that you are "or will act as one".
It'd be a good tactic to also at the end of an article to ask if you can come back soon as a loyal reader would and continue to address you as such in some form or another or welcoming you back for the first of many times to come.
For example, I might conclude a post with:
"Thank you for reading, I appreciate your continued loyalty as a reader as well as all of the other loyal readers, and I will see you next time. (I will see you next time, right?)"
In your head when you read it, you can almost imagine yourself saying yes as you're asked the question (see what I did there? Sorry, couldn't help myself on that one). But despite the suggestiveness of the last sentence, it is true that when you're given a suggestion followed by "right?" in that manner you tend to accept it.
Perhaps a better tactic is "moving past the sale". In other words, assuming that you've already said yes I could have made another statement to get you to pay attention to an extreme or false equivalency that requires you to accept the premise (or imagine doing so) before you can even debate it. What if I said "A somewhat loyal viewer views a site 1 time a day and spends 20 minutes a day on the site. A normal loyal viewer returns 3 times a day and spends half an hour but my super viewers return 12 times a day and spend over 40 hours a week on my site, which are you?" and had you place a vote and totally rigged the poll so over 80% answered "super viewer". I could even ensure that the poll didn't add up to 100% so that you can point out how clearly erroneous my assumption is and think you've "won".
Even if it's factually wrong, the point is to get you to debate or question the magnitude of how much of a "loyal viewer are you" or what magnitude of loyalty you have.
Another example of moving past the sale is Trump suggesting he's worth $10B or suggesting some very large number of people committed voter fraud that the news anchors and blogs and individuals then have to fact check. Even if people concede he's not worth 10 billion, he still wins in controlling attention and the narrative. If people argue the magnitude of how many committed voter fraud, they're talking about voter fraud instead of the popular vote. People can "fact check him" and say he's wrong, but he's moving past the sale and you're still concluding "he's rich".
It's much better that people say "he's not really as rich as he says" than debate whether or not a rich person should be president. Those who dislike him will automatically want to argue against him. While those who dislike him are busy arguing how rich they've already accepted the premise that somehow his degree of wealth is important, as if you could somehow disqualify him if you proved he was only worth 1Billion dollars. The problem there is that if having less money is less qualifying, you've implied that his opponent is weaker by that standard even if you win the argument.
He talked past the sale effectively and without knowing it many people accepted the premise (or at least implied) that more money is better in a presidential candidate.
Narrative and premises that people accept by engaging in conversation are more important than people recognize.
If a news anchor for example has effectively gotten someone to actually reply to a baseless accusation in a defensive manner, they've moved past the sale. By the person actually responding to the accusation directly, the subtext is that the person who accused them of it is a rational person. A better response would be to respond in confusion and ask the accuser if they've even met you before, suggest that only stalkers and crazy people make such baseless accusations without evidence and asking which one they are? (depending on the charge... if they accuse you of being mean, such a response would confirm their suggestion)
Debates and discussions are sort of a battle for persuasion in and of themselves. Confrontation and ridicule is not always the most persuasive angle, but it can be at times.
Sometimes it's best to argue the opposite position at an extreme. If you know people are automatically going to take the opposite position, reverse psychology works best. It helps if you're a confrontational brash figure with a large percentage of people who strongly dislike you. There was only one example that I ever really saw in the online world of someone insulting people until they bought his product. He marketed himself as the "rich jerk" and basically said things like, "this product is not for losers like you". Rather than trying to sell you, he was trying to say you shouldn't buy his product overtly (even if subliminally he was trying to sell it). Basically he took an unconventional approach which grabbed attention, offended you, and then once you hated him and were ready to say no to whatever he said he said "this product is not for you" and "don't buy this product until you've tried every other one first and failed because everyone else is wrong."
But if you're taking that angle, you also want to sort of move away from that extreme and revise it until you concede what you initially wanted to say. The people you're arguing with feel they've won, but it was planned from the beginning.
Thank you for reading, I appreciate your continued loyalty as a reader as well as all of the other loyal readers, and I will see you next time. (I will see you next time, right?)
Another thing you have to do is actually get something posted, even if it's incomplete. Don't be a perfectionist, be a revisionist. Post ugly initially and edit later. And on that note I have a publish button to press. (click)
note:Perfectionism is an enemy when you look at it as a desintation and not a process. If it is a process that never will end then it is okay to publish a post ugly and then work on it. Have some kind of prelaunch state on a blog before the finished product if you must maintain a minimum standard of quality before posting. You can always go back and test things and edit and add and modify as you go and even retry the ideas in a different format from a different angle and/or on a different website later. Inaction is far more detrimental to your success. You may try say 5 posts on one blog and 5 on another and if there isn't interest you might try a little bit of promotion if you must but focus more of your time on what works and less on what doesn't.
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