Analysis, Guestimating, Guessing and Making Things Up

On the interwebz there are four kinds of information.  This main point of this post is the fourth kind of information.  But I need to define the others before I get to that one.

1.  Information based on analysis, aka “assumptions”.  This is the kind of information that comes from something like Google analytics or WordPress statistics.  This is what you have when you take some data gathered by a method you don’t fully understand and make an assumption about what it means.  How many hits your website has had according to Google falls into this category.

Who hands out this kind of advice.

• 1% of SEO experts.
• 5% of internet marketing experts.
• 0% of social media experts.

2.  Information based on guestimating means you have much less data that can be passed off as unbiased so your conclusions don’t even qualify as assumptions.  This is where people are running on intuition and inspiration.  It’s really not a bad place to be and in some cases I will submit that intuition and inspiration are actually better than data harvested by unknown people by unknown means for unknown reasons.  Well actually the reasons are known.  The data is harvested to sell to corporations.  But you get my point.

Who hands out this kind of advice.

• 4% of SEO experts.
• 10% of internet marketing experts.
• 0% of social media experts.

3.  Information gleaned from guessing is what most of the interwebz is based on.  It’s guessing.  You don’t recognize it as guessing because most people have very short memories.  Most people who make internet related “predictions” are wrong 98% of the time.  You might think the public would recognize this – except that since the general public can’t remember what happened yesterday all of the wrong predictions slip from memory.  People who guess are the ones who are most adamant about their “expert” status.

Internet Rule Number One.

Anyone who claims to be an expert isn’t.

People who actually know what they are doing know that the methodology of the internet changes weekly, sometimes daily, and no one can be an expert on something that is constantly changing.

For the record I am not an expert.  I have lots of opinions.  If my Grandmother were still alive she would say “Opinions are like ass holes.  Everyone has one and they all stink.”  My Grandmother was way smart.

Who hands out this kind of advice.

• 20% of SEO experts.
• 30% of internet marketing experts.
• 10% of social media experts.

4.  Making things up is what happens when people who read a book written by someone who saw the internet one day start giving opinions.

Here is the story that I’ve been building up to.  One of my clients comes to me and says something to the effect of “My friend told me that I need to make my blog posts shorter because my readers don’t want to have to read a lot of text.  She also told me that I should have a tag line on each post and the entire post should fit on the screen so they don’t have to scroll down.  So I want to make the font smaller.”

Now these things may or may not be true.  Most bloggers do keep their posts under 1000 words.  Sometimes much less that 1000 words.  Other bloggers like Roosh V write long posts, that get millions of hits, and make a living selling books and writing really long blog posts.

Tag lines for each post?  Sure, why not.

Smaller font?  Whatever makes you happy.  The font size is ultimately determined by the viewer’s software anyhow.

What follows is a hard cold fact.

The blog we were discussing hadn’t gone live yet and has no readers.  No one.  Let me repeat this.

The blog has NO READERS.  NONE.  No one can say what the readers of this blog want or don’t want.  It has no readers.

No one can know the demographics of the readers of a blog that has no readers.

It is impossible to know demographic information about a group of people that has zero people in it.

Has the point sunk in yet?  If not re-read the previous five very short paragraphs.

This is the sort of silliness you have to learn to recognize and reject.

This sorts of nonsense is why you must read Confessions Of An Online Hustler if you are serious about blogging.  He explains how you go about finding out what your demographic wants and then giving it to them.

Who hands out this kind of advice.

• 75% of SEO experts.
• 55% of internet marketing experts.
• 90% of social media experts.

When someone is giving you advice about your website ask some questions and do some critical thinking.  Determine which of these categories their advice falls into and respond accordingly.  Shunning the people who are making things up is totally acceptable.