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How White Noise Supercharges My Productivity

May 03 2011

There are so many productivity tips floating around the Internet that I would most likely require a productivity course just to stop myself from drowning in them. Being the sucker that I am for time management techniques, I thought I would share my favourite must-have tool for boosting productivity.

It’s free, it’s simple, and as far as my whimsical attention span is concerned, it’s a bloody miracle that the thing actually works.

The tool in question is SimplyNoise.com. SimplyNoise is a white noise generator that serves no other purpose than to bombard your eardrums with a collection of static frequencies. At first listen, you will find white noise a poor alternative to whatever you had locked and loaded on Spotify.

There are no lyrics. The beat doesn’t change. In fact, there is no beat. White noise is pretty much what Norman Bates would listen to and praise as his mother’s favourite song. There is method in the madness, however, and there is good reason why many people swear by white noise to maintain their focus.

As anybody who has recently seen Limitless will recall, the brain is a delicate organ. It can process a huge amount of information and then call upon it at will. But your brain doesn’t always meet your demand when you want it to. Hence writer’s block, procrastination and those times where any little noise or distraction is capable of disrupting your thought flow.

White noise helps focus the mind by blanketing all the distracting sounds that our brain tries to latch on to.

If you imagine a room buzzing with 100 different voices, the combined frequencies produce a sound that the brain treats similarly to white noise. By tuning in to white noise you can therefore block out distractions like construction work, noisy neighbours and crying babies. The brain still hears them, but it adds those distractions to the rest of the frequency pile and allows you to maintain your focus.

If you work at home like me, you’ll probably appreciate that sounds can be amplified by simply being on your own. I hear everything from my puppies barking to the building work going on outside. While I’d be an utter fool to use this as the sole excuse for failing to meet my goals, it definitely pays to master your undivided attention.

Many people rely on sites like SimplyNoise to help them sleep. In fact, any insomniac should be able to relate to the frustration of things that go bump in the night. By blitzing the bedroom with white noise, you can sooth your brain and tune out of your surroundings. You can also irritate your girlfriend if she isn’t the “Finchy needs to listen to his moonkissed dolphins or he’ll never get to sleep” kinda type.

You might not appreciate or even agree with the benefits of white noise, but a lot of workplaces already use it to generate a healthy working environment. Google search office white noise machine and you’ll find a bunch of companies that specialise in acoustics for the workplace.

My girlfriend refuses to acknowledge that SimplyNoise is anything more than a static irritant she could do without. I guess productivity is flexible like that. While she can happily work to the tune of Kim Kardashian’s inane fucking rabble on Channel E, I find myself getting distracted by my own iTunes playlists.

Let me know how you get on with the white noise generator. I’ve heard some positive feedback from people who’ve become addicted to it. You might not find it as enlightening as Mozart, but see if your concentration thanks you!

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How To Gatecrash The Title Of Mr. Authority

Apr 15 2011

It’s not easy establishing a website when your name counts for nothing. You can have the best content, the swankiest WordPress theme and even the biggest marketing budget. But without gatecrashing your niche’s network of influential people, it’s all going to feel like shoving crap up a hill. A constant struggle for little reward.

This meandering post is going to give you a few pointers for how to attract influential people to your site.

One Follower = One Backlink?

In many ways, I consider people to be the new backlinks. It’s very easy to buy a thousand Facebook “Likes”, just as it’s easy to blast a thousand forum profiles with xrumer. Most people are agreed that where link marketing is concerned, quality beats quantity. And that is also the case with acquiring fans or followers.

Look no further than the self-proclaimed social media experts on Twitter to discover just how irrelevant numbers can be. So you’ve got 15,000 followers, a shiny custom background and a name that rings out to your mother and close friends. It doesn’t mean shit if you’re a nobody in the eyes of the people that matter.

Every niche market has a select group of influential people that exert power over the rest of the marketplace. I would suggest that instead of spending your days preaching to the dumbfounded choir (Hello, WSOs on Warrior Forum), you go after these trend-setters and attempt to get in bed with them.

In the same way that one authoritative backlink is much more valuable than a thousand directory submissions, one influential fan holds considerably more power than a small battalion of “Who The Fuck Are You Again?” Followers.

So how can you gatecrash the party of influential trendsetters in your niche? How can you get behind those closed doors where opportunity awaits? Much has to do with building a brand, as I spoke about in my last post. But you also need to be relentless in your pursuit of the people that matter.

Understanding Who Controls Your Niche

Ask yourself a simple question: Where are my customers or readers likely to be found on the web?

When you know where your audience is hiding, you can begin to draw rings around the people you need to be reaching if you want to crack that network of influence. Let’s say your market is heavily populated by messageboards and forum communities.

Stop Whoring Yourself On Messageboards

The first step, as recommended in every shitty How To guide under the Digital Point sun, would be to register a profile and start posting in the hope that people click your lame signature link. This sucks. It’s not going to do much for your readership. Especially if all you have to your name is seven posts and an introductory thread.

A much more effective method is to hang back and look for the forum’s most popular posters. Find out who has the adoring affections of the community, and approach them with a private message asking how much they’d charge to endorse your site in their signature. Not many posters will turn down the chance to be paid for what they already do.

If you’re going to compromise the value of your time by posting on messageboards, at least make sure you have something valuable to add to the argument. Playing Devil’s Advocate is often a good ploy.

Breaking The Blogger’s Ego

What if the most influential people in your niche consist mainly of other bloggers? It can be very difficult for a blogger to gain status with other bloggers. Especially if his shit is actually good, and deemed threatening by the others.

The best way to breach a circle of influential bloggers is to deceive them with flattery. Comment on their posts, retweet their statuses and do your best to engage them in conversation. If you can squeeze in a guest post or two, all the better. The sooner they begin to associate you as a fan of their work, rather than a direct competitor, the easier you’re going to find it to get them engaging in your site.

Flattery will get you on the good side of your blogging peers, but to really leverage their power, you have to maintain excellent content. It has to be better than theirs, period. This is the only way you’ll earn their respect. Bloggers are much more willing to help others who have already stroked their egos.

An easy way to get an influential blogger to share your work is to namedrop them in a post, lace it with a sweet compliment, and then make sure they find it close to a retweet button. Or you could hand out your own blogger awards – voted by the people, of course – giving the target every incentive to repost it on his own blog in a bid for votes.

There are many ways to skin the cat, but you can’t go too linkbait crazy. Your site has to earn their respect before they’ll see you as anything other than a permanent oral fixture on their balls. Which, at this stage, let’s face it, you probably are.

If You Can’t Assert Authority, Be Happy With Mediocrity

Once upon a time, I ran a pro wrestling news site. If you’ve ever delved in to professional wrestling “news” journalism, you’ll be aware that about a hundred different journalists rely on the same one source for their news. One single whisper in the wind controls what all the websites are able to publish.

Readers would gravitate towards the sites where news broke first. If you couldn’t get the news before your competition, the best case scenario was hiring an overly keen sixteen year old to copy and paste like a whippet on coke. In this niche, the network of influence was restricted to a bunch of undisclosed sources (eg. Hulk Hogan’s makeup girl selling a hearsay backstage rumour for fifty bucks) and established journalists who’d been reporting from the same behind-the-scenes pedestal since the 80s.

As soon as I understood this, I moved on. I wasn’t passionate enough to immerse myself in breaching these sources and getting to the news first. Where would I even start? The Yellow Pages and a wiretap on Vince McMahon’s cellphone? Give me a break, I’m no real journalist. Without the exclusives, I’d always be a step behind the other news sites. If you can’t beat them, join them. If you can’t join them, why are you wasting your time?

Some projects are just too ambitious for one man in his basement. But I learnt something very important that I try to remember before I embark on any new project. You have to understand what your readers want, and be capable of delivering it.

How To Become Mr. Authority

Not every person of influence in your industry is going to have a website or blog. You shouldn’t be drawn in to thinking that you have to befriend every blogger or every high profile Twitter user. Sometimes, it pays to look further afield than rival sites for gaining authority.

I know one successful music blogger who has never given the time of day to linkbuilding or competing with rival sites. She doesn’t bother with SEO, commenting on other blogs or leaving crappy forum replies. She simply sends email after email to new and upcoming artists, introducing herself and letting them know what her blog is all about.

Inevitably, she gets sent a ton of free shit. Passes to a bunch of shows, free festival tickets, signed albums…just about anything she wants. But most importantly, it’s allowed her to establish a reputation as a trend-setter on the music blogging scene.

How?

By understanding where she can add the most value to her blog. The value is in the relationships.

When was the last time you took the effort to introduce yourself to the companies you spend so long writing about? The best bloggers aren’t merely respected by their readers and rival webmasters, but by the very companies they’re writing about too.

The easiest way for you to gain influence isn’t to jostle for supremacy with the guy ranking above you on Google, but to instead chase down the owner of the product you’re trying to rank for. It never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to build influence in a market, when you have an ear pinned to the ground of the companies that matter.

This could be as simple as building a list of the top five companies, then contacting their PR departments, introducing yourself and stating what you can offer with your website. Nothing has to materialize straight away. But good things come to those who put themselves in the right places.

And I can guarantee, most bloggers are too busy worrying about yesterday’s stats to be actively engaging with the companies they write about. The only relationships they bother chasing come hand in hand with affiliate commission, which is perfectly fine, but selling yourself very short if you want to be a true authority in your niche.

There isn’t a business in the world that doesn’t like a slice of friendly publicity. Get the exclusives that your rivals were too busy waiting to read about in their Google Alerts, and you will quickly discover it’s actually quite easy to gain influence.

Most of us who own websites or blogs are simply middlemen, wrestling with other middlemen for backlinks, search engine rankings and god knows what else. The quicker you turn your attention to understanding your readers, and the companies you write about, the sooner you’ll be able to forget about the other middlemen formerly known as your competition.

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My Niches Bring All The Clicks To The Yard

Mar 18 2011

Internet Marketing was plain sailing in the early 2000s. There was a time where simply buying the right domain would put you in the money. In these harder times, we have a buzz word called “niche marketing”. The art of finding topics most people don’t give a crap about and setting up shop for the small handful who do.

It can be very profitable. Building a website to satisfy a small demand is much easier than battling in a network full of bigger, better and richer competition.

Here’s the thing. Just because a niche is nowhere close to being saturated, that doesn’t mean you should be rushing to stick your dick in it with a sparkling new WordPress installation. Some niches are untapped for a reason. That reason being they suck donkey chode when it comes to making money.

The argument, one I’ve heard many times before, is that traffic is traffic. Who cares if my website reviews antique deck chairs from the 1950s? Stats are stats and if Google is sending me traffic, my site must be worth something. If it’s already drawing some Adsense clicks, all the more power to my “thinking outside the box”.

Building niche websites is the sort of game that anybody can play. Hands up if you can pinpoint an interest obscure enough to have no other presence on the web? Christ, it’s not hard. Here, let me string several niche markets together.

How about a site for divorced Jewish transvestites?

By the laws of human insanity, there’s probably at least 14 people searching for this every month. Six of them being me about 30 seconds ago. And yet I’m guessing there isn’t a niche site for it yet?

So are you going to sit down and build one…just because you can?

Unless you have some seriously hot product catering directly for the market we’re talking about, I’d take a step back and think about what you’re doing. If you see zero potential beyond Adsense and a rare Amazon book referral, you’re probably wasting your time. You niched out too far.

My point is that we can dig so deep for opportunity that we sometimes forget the actual principal of what we’re trying to do; make lots of money.

When you’re running the rule over which new niches to branch in to, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Is this a buying market?

Forget Adsense. Websites built around Adsense are clusterfuck monstrosities that have no place on the Internet. Do you have something legitimate that you can sell to the people interested in this niche? Are there web-savvy local businesses – with actual budgets – that would value your content?

2. If I don’t have a buying market, do I have a LOT of traffic?

It’s okay to not have anything obvious to sell, if you have the necessary weight of traffic to rely on numbers instead. Celebrity fan sites, current trends and big upcoming local events can often merit a website. Why? Because if you do them correctly, you can produce enormous surges of traffic that attract direct buy advertisers.

If attracting highly targeted users to a niche website is one method of making money, the reverse is to take the “niche” out of niche marketing and simply drive a ton of traffic.

Think of all those sports streaming websites out there. Many people don’t want to pay for the PPV package to watch UFC live. So if you stick a live stream up with some pretty basic gateway advertising, you can fill such a huge demand that the numbers make you money – not the concept itself.

3. What is the absolute best case scenario?

Because if your answer is “I sell 3 deck chairs in March and make enough money to pay for my dedicated server“, this is probably just a mid-life crisis you’re going through. Carefully select the Back button and filter back in to whatever pipe dream you came from.

I know it’s easy to aim too high. I mean, shit, my career is built around making people believe in that high. But if your niche website has no obvious gold tap that can be switched on, forget about it and go back to the drawing board. It’s hard enough to make money online WITH a vision of where the money’s going to come from, let alone without one.

4. What is the work vs rewards ratio for my competitors?

If you’re looking at moving in to a niche full of psychopath groupies who whittle away their every hour posting content for the reward of jack diddily, you might want to have a rethink. How serious are your competitors ? If they’re working hard for no money, you’re probably going to have to work even harder just to get the show off the ground.

Do not try to beat Justin Bieber fans at building Justin Bieber niche websites, unless you plan on outsourcing to within a community.

Actually, let me rephrase myself. If your tentative keyword research throws up anything related to Justin Bieber, empty your browser history, wash your hands with soap and think about what you just thought.

What’s wrong with you? There’s a line Internet Marketers should know not to cross.

5. Can I commit to this niche?

Most important of all! If you don’t feel capable of getting your hands dirty with a niche, it’s not going to be a winner. That doesn’t mean you have to be the poor guy sat at his desk and churning out article after article on the topic. But if you know you can’t get the quality content published, you’re only ever going to be a bum search engine traffic gamer.

People forget that simply rolling out a niche website isn’t going to be enough to dominate a market. You have to become an authority in that niche. Doing this requires actual knowledge and expertise. You’re going to have to outsource your content to an expert in the field, or a damn good researcher.

There’s a lot more to consider when launching a niche website than the sheer weight of traffic numbers on Google keyword sandbox. Focus on the potential of making money. Because without that, you’re just another pillock with a fansite.

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