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The blogosphere is getting saturated. Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution? Do you know? Here’s my view… and if you manage to read to the end, I promise it will be worth your while.

Back in 1980′s, when the notion of the “service economy” was first bandied about, detractors claimed there was no way to maintain a viable economy by selling hamburgers to each other. Back then, the internet was still ruled by people who at least understood Bill Joy’s sockets code, if not capable of actually hacking it. Email was sent using uucp.

That was then… this is now… and it looks like, indeed, we can’t support an economy by selling hamburgers to each other.

I believe the same principle holds for internet marketing and MMO businesses. There’s going to be a few McDonalds and Burger Kings and Walmarts – the top 10% – raking in 90% of the market, leaving the other 90% to scrabble over the remaining 10%.

The uphot: there will be a few big players in the MMO field. But not many.

And not a helluva lot in between. At least if the recent past is any model for the future.

Johnny B Truant is right: Not everyone is going to make it.

To be sure, the MMO market is hot right now, so there should be plenty of small business opportunity in that bottom 10%.

And because technology changes so fast… the small, furry animals of this ecosystem have a real opportunity to become the mammoths and mastodons of a new era.

You know who some of these are already: John Chow. Jeremy Shoemaker. Darren Rowse. Each run their blogging as a business, and while they may be pushing million dollar operations, I can guarantee you having 20 employees (Shoemaker) doesn’t leave a lot of that million bucks left over. Think about it: one of the top bloggers in the world, 7 years in, barely cracking a megabuck… with a lot of overhead.

Go ahead and follow those guys. I’m not competing with them; they’re years ahead of the likes of me.

MMO blogging is no gravy train either. Take John Chow for example. Mr Chow gets a hard time. He pushes the envelope and gets smacked. Like, being dropped from Google’s index. But he gives away a lot too. Good stuff too. I’ve learned from the free material he’s posted on his blog. John Chow gives away stuff I’d like to sell, actionable information that took me time to learn.

Can you compete against John or Jeremy or Darren?

Sure you can! But you better buckle up and strap in, because it’s going to be a brutal, brutal ride… over a long, long haul.

And bear in mind that MMO, or blogging in general is entertainment at best, but more like a service industry. If you don’t show up every day, you’re going to get killed in the search index. I’m watching one of my previous reader’s traffic plummet right now. I think she’ll come back up fast, but she’s going to have to put the time in.

In fact, MMO/blogging looks a lot like a pyramid scheme to me: Too many bloggers, too much being written, not enough readers.

The MMO pyramid scheme

Here’s why I feel it’s all going pear-shaped:

• Expensive products from two years ago got heavily discounted last year, and are now given away as promotions for low cost membership plans. The value of the information hasn’t changed a bit: it’s worth every minute of the time you put into it.

  But the cash flow is drying up.

• Too many claims for too little work producing too much cash. I have specific names in mind, which I’ll not mention. Let’s just say these folk are brilliant sales people, but in my mind they’re playing the greed angle. Which doesn’t work so well with me because I’m not that greedy.

  This is like the stock market: everyone makes money off the greater fool, until there are fools no more.

  In short, the further down the food chain you are, the less return you get for your time and money. The low hanging fruit has been picked by the time you come along.

• Not enough of the information – especially on blog posts – is actionable. Small, “keyword rich” posts saying very little yet attracting many comments (because of, say, dofollow linking) have trouble passing the “So what?” test. Which means they have little long term staying power.

  Much activity in the MMO blogosphere is equivalent to serving each other cheeseburgers.

• Too much recycled pap. If it was pap when it was first published, recycling it doesn’t make it any more nutritious. Those cheeseburgers don’t provide a good base for an economy.

Yikes. That’s quite an indictment!

Let’s take a stab at an answer…

Surviving the MMO/blogging infopocalypse

If you’re in the MMO/blogging niche, I predict within a year, let’s say Dec 2010, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions. Should you stay or should you go?

I can’t answer that question for you. Can’t even answer it that well for me.

But I can take action, which you can see from the posting history here on Website In A Weekend:

1. Providing content ranging from beginner to guru. SEO articles are popular, well-read and attract comments. And ephemeral. Nobody tomorrow cares about yesterday’s hot SEO trick. (I have a lot more to say about SEO in the future.)

   Articles on using chmod in cygwin to fix a permission problem for the Apache server in Windows are not as popular. But they stand the test of time. Windows has been borked for a long time, and I’m not holding my breath that Windows 7 will be any better. And the traffic such articles do attract can be very high quality.

   On the other hand, content ranging from beginner to guru risks confusing readers.

   It’s a tradeoff.

2. Demonstrating measurable skills. I won’t write an article unless I personally did something.

   Conversely, anyone wanting know exactly what I can do can find it here.

   I don’t worry about content theft for articles demonstrating actual skill. The only articles I’ve had stolen are related to social media and SEO. That is, “hot money keywords.” Thinking about it this way, I shouldn’t even worry about it. The stuff I really know how to do can’t be stolen. That stuff is between my ears. Writing out a description of it won’t help anyone that doesn’t do the work.

3. Learning new technology independent of the MMO/blogging industry. For example, I’ve got a Google Wave invitation which is going to occupy a fair bit of my time in the near future. A couple of my WordPress plugins are also begging for attention. And I have a few long term projects completely outside the web application industry.
4. Learning how to monetize. Yes, I would like to fire and forget Website In A Weekend at some point. Get it set up to run on autopilot. Have the cash roll in automatically.

   But that’s not how it works.

   Instead, I’m working to decouple revenue from the clock on the wall, and learning how to leverage content so that the effort per unit time multiplies rather than sums returns.

5. Learning how to really write. Good writing skills are “platform independent.” Transferrable.

   Same as programming, something HR people don’t seem to understand. Solid software engineering skills result from a mastery of process, not buzzword compliance. But I’m digressing…

   Getting back on topic, I’m specifically teaching myself to write compelling long copy. My favorite authors, and some of the most widely read bloggers, write very long articles on a regular basis.

   Writing long articles is easy.

   
   Writing long articles that attract readers is harder. Here’s a little offer for you: closest guess to the word count of this article gets an hour of my time on chat for an editorial sweep over any article you please. My website or yours, we’ll dismantle that article into it’s components and put it back together 5 times better. (Offer ends Midnight PDT November 4 2009.)

Actions you can take right now

There’s plenty you can do, right now, to insulate yourself from a readership crash. Here’s a few suggestions:

Leverage off of your existing skills. If you haven’t yet established yourself as an authority in your field of expertise, that’s a great place to start. It doesn’t matter what that field is, if you can write about it, you can build authority and credibility, likely with much less competition than in the MMO/blogging realm.

While you see me learning the ins and outs of WordPress (and some MMO) here on Website In A Weekend, I have a long queue of articles on C programming on a different blog, waiting for opportunity. If necessary, I’ll finish and publish these. Surely you have something similar you can write about.

Choose one or two very specific online technologies to master. For example, if you master mailing list technology, you may be able to market just that service specifically. Or you be a whiz at Twitter. Or Facebook.

Spend time in meatspace for networking. Real, live face-to-face interaction is an important component for building trust and credibility, and for meeting people outside your own circle. Pick the best conference in your area of interest. For bloggers, that’s probably Blog World Expo.

I’m super weak on this. I like hanging out at home. When I go out, I like to go surfing, or clubbing, or whatever as long as it’s not working. Networking events always seem to be held when there’s a great swell in the water, or there’s a DJ I really want to see. So I fight traffic to get somewhere I’m not sure I really want to be… and spend my time thinking about shredding something gnarly at Ocean Beach. Yeah, bad attitude. I’ll work on it.

Opportunity abounds

There’s too much information, and not enough time. Those are problems. Where’s the solutions?

Smells like opportunity:

Very few tools exist for evaluating trust and credibility. It’s almost creepy to think about, but I suspect most of us will live to see a “trust index” similar to Fair Isaac. You ready for that?

And no tools for measuring actionability. I don’t know if actionability is even a word… but I would like a way to evaluate online content for it’s applicability to my problems. Before I have to read it.

What about aggregated affiliate tracking? I don’t want to log in to umpteen different web site to track my affiliate account status. Is there software for this? Has this problem been solved? Maybe so, someone point me at it.

Homework: how can bloggers – us – create or add value to help solve these problems? Then we’re part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Speaking of affiliation…

Affiliate technology may be in the dark ages

Read Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End for one extremely plausible account of where affiliation may lead us. Affiliation could be huge, and it might end up as blowback on corporate media interests which have spent 30 years downsizing everything possible. Hey, there’s real people out here, and we’re gonna talk to each with or without Mainstream Media! We’re going to license each other’s content, and we’re going to support each other’s businesses. With or without corporate involvement (Web 4.0 folks. You read it here first).

We’ve covered a lot in this article. As Johnny notes, not everyone is going to make it. But everyone can use blogging to create their own portfolio. It’s not a waste of time by any means.

If you’re addicted to blogging; if you have to write, keep after it. Your content is yours. You’re building your own intellectual property. This means even if you stop blogging, you still own potentially valuable content! And if you’re not exactly sure what to do, do what I’m doing: Put the pedal to the metal! Devil take the hindmost!

What’s your plan? Anything specific you want to talk about? Speak!