Why Peer-to-Peer SEO Beats Influencer Ass Kissing
*
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
Great message, dude. I quickly became disenchanted by those who did not reciprocate interest.
To date, an ‘influencer’ (to me) is someone like you, like Wayne Barker, like Alessio, like others who were down to engage with me…
I learned, I continue to learn, and I appreciate the community and my work much more for the relations. I’m not really sure (Who)TF some are under the impression they are or can do.. but I assure readers, you’ll get a lot more out of the community by engaging those who are like minded and willing to participate with you.
An ‘influencer’ is someone who influences you. Who’s more likely to do more- those high from such great heights..or those who are willing to directly relate to you? I have my answer.
Hey Anthony, there are all kinds of influencers, for instance there are connectors or curators who are less likely to stand in the limelight but nonetheless exert much influence on others.
Still I didn’t mean to complain about the really famous influencers or thought leaders. There is a reason why they are so influential.
You can look up to Rand Fishkin for example, I do even though I’m older than him for example.
My main point I think is that THESE people, the ones who are at the top can’t mingle with everybody, it’s just too much. Unless your job is mostly about networking and being a public figure like in Lee Odden’s case. Even Lee can’t reciprocate all the time though.
Simply Kick Ass! Very bold article Ted!
I think Peer2Peer SEO helps in terms of business as well… If your network of professional friends is good then you can always redirect project lead from one to another or sometimes due to currency difference you take some part of the service from other SEO who know you professionally…
I am not saying i never ran behind influencers but i would highly agree to a higher extent that spending lot of time on networking to connect and get in to the eye of influencers have a very low ROI…I think one should divide his time in such a way that he stay active on social media and at the same time should be able to complete his to-do list…
I can’t really argue with what you say here. I think that people are drawn to ‘rockstars’ for different reasons – it might be idolatry, it might be recognition of common interests, it might be a belief that it is a valuable thing to do from a business perspective, or perhaps something else.
I think we see a lot of people in this industry connecting on a geographic basis, whether through tweetups (hate that term), local conferences or something in-between. Beyond that I would say there is nothing more valuable than a relationship between ‘equals’. I don’t mean that to suggest people of directly comparable ability or experience, rather people who have an equivalent amount of time and interest one for the other.
There are people in this industry who I know I could drop an email to and get a valuable response at their earliest convenience. That’s more worthwhile to me than getting a tweet from a rockstar telling me they appreciate something I’ve said, or laughing at a quip or caustic comment I’ve delivered. Not that those things are without value. It’s all relative.
Thanks for clearing up who our real competitors are. I remember reading somewhere about how traffic is shared, people will often read from more than one source in their area of interest.
[…] Having peers in your industry’s online community is certainly an asset that you can benefit from for a very long time. May it be in terms of getting traffic or business referrals from them, absorbing their loyal followers, and getting high-end links from their site’s content. […]
[…] Why Peer-to-Peer SEO beats influencer Ass Kissing- One of the hands down, best said ways to get noticed. Let everyone else kiss the asses the A-list. Build your own network based on those that share your same world views and beliefs. […]
Happy to be an old peer of yours, Tad. And yes, while the big influencers may be really nice people, they don’t have the time to invest in more than a few real relationships. And really, smaller influencers have smaller reach, but their influence can be stronger and deeper.
BTW, read your latest post on banning Google. Good on ya! :)
Moosa: Thank you! Btw. you are the expert #1 in blogger outreach and relationships so your opinion is very important to me on this issue here.
Iain: Yeah, many people meet in real life which is great. I’ve done that locally as well for a time. Then I realized that I like a lot of people across the pond who aren’t as available. Also I’m not traveling as much for personal reasons. Thus I reach out to people I will perhaps never meet.
Ricardo: I’ve written even a longer post on that topic a while back:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/who-is-your-competition-on-the-web
Donna: Glad to see you back here, especially as you are a famous book author now! Amazing. Congratulations on this. I wish I was that courageous. Btw. banning Google really feels liberating. You should try it one day as well! I feel like giving up smoking or fast food.
[…] IMO Peer-to-Peer SEO works pretty well specially in terms of getting your work reviewed as well as getting more business. Tad Chef also did a wonderful post on this topic that you can found on his blog SEO 2.0. […]
[…] have been plenty of casualties. Your new mindset needs to think past quick wins, you need to be building relationships, creating partnerships, fostering creativity, thinking long term. You need to be investing in […]
[…] online peers will always send new readers down your way, as they continuously share your content through social […]
[…] Peer-to-peer SEO can strongly affect how your online community sees your brand, and thus helps to establish credibility and attract more linkers to your content. […]