Why Peer-to-Peer SEO Beats Influencer Ass Kissing

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In the past I have written repeatedly about the need to find your peers and to work together with them for the benefit of all parties involved.

On the Web it’s not about competing with 7 billions of people.

It’s about cooperating with the few who care. This makes the difference. How do you find them? Where to start?

 

The influencer ass kissing trend

Why do I have to write about it again? Well, in recent years the pressure to go after influencers has been mounting.

By now so called influencer marketing has gone so far that influential people get their ass kissed on every occasion. It stinks.

Influencer ass kissing is not the path to long-term and stable success.

There are far too many people willing to ass kiss and not enough celebrity asses to kiss. The outcome is that you have to wait in line to kiss ass.

Even when you do kiss ass the rockstar you are after barely notices. After all they get so used to having their ass kissed that it becomes negligible.

 

Why influencers tend to ignore you

You can do a handstand while kissing ass or something but it won’t matter in the long run.

Instead of trying to be the best ass kissing expert around you have an alternative, peer-to-peer SEO.

Before I go into details about P2P SEO I will explain why going after the really important influencers is a short-sighted tactic.

It takes a whole lot of work to even get the attention of your favorite rockstar.

These people run real life businesses in most cases, they have families and they travel around all the time.

You can take a picture with them on a conference, you get them to comment below your egobait or maybe they even share your content once but what about the other 364 days?

Will the magic touch of the holy influencer make you thrive throughout the year?

I’m also an influencer to some extent but there are people who are much more influential than I am.

Why are some people more influential than others? Some people own a company with dozens of experts working for them while they can blog, travel and speak on conferences all the time.

 

Working vs social networking

I have work to do and then do some social networking afterwards. Thus I have even less time.

Most other people who don’t own the time of others and can readily spend it on their behalf have the same issue.

Business blogging, social media engagement and SEO tasks can take 48h a day and still not really take off.

Peer-to-Peer SEO is indeed the short cut all of these people need to succeed.

You connect with others who have the same problem – they work for themselves or maybe even have a few employees but are not highly influential.

On the other hand very popular tech pundits like Robert Scoble are already famous for being famous by now. They are celebrities. Being influential is also their job.

We rather spend only an hour or two a day on blogging, social media and search while working on their client projects or their own businesses.

 

How people stay sane online

People read only a bunch of other blogs, they socialize only with a relatively small group of people they trust on the Web.

They optimize their sites where they can without spending days on

  • keyword research
  • website optimization
  • link building
  • conversion optimization
  • web analytics

for each and every page or post.

The “trick” is to get the attention of a dozen of peers who care about the same things you do care about.

Find out who they are, where they are and how you can help them. In case you are really short on time try to motivate them to become a tribe on Triberr or just let things flow like I do.

Make sure this dozen reads your posts. Get their peer review. When your article sucks don’t stalk them for shares.

When they like it they will read and vote for it or maybe even link to it despite most people not linking out much these days.

P2P SEO doesn’t only apply to the SEO industry or digital marketing or whatever you want to call it

what you do to get visitors for websites. You can do that for any niche, industry, country or even subculture.

There are always peers who already cover your topics. Just look up the people sell the same services you do.

You can also simply spend your time on the same social sites you do sharing the things you like.

Identify them, say hello, be useful instead of ass kissing the superstars who can’t even see you among the crowds who are screaming and running behind them.

One of the niche communities I use to socialize with peers is Growth Hackers. There are others like Product Hunt for startups for example.

 

Peers care

Once you have a bunch of peers who have noticed you you may want to link out to them or even create a positive SEO campaign for mutual benefit.

Remember that your real competitors are not these people who struggle like you to get noticed.

Google, Amazon, Ebay etc. are the ones you have to outsmart.

They have no friends, they have just employees and customers. These people only care for them as long as their products and services rock.

Your peers care for you as long as you are there and actively engaging.

Some additional articles on P2P SEO from my peers:

 

* (CC BY-ND 2.0) Creative Commons image by Tambako the Jaguar

 

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