There is this book, called “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. I didn’t read it, but from what people told me, it’s a good one. It dwells in the fact that all we have is the present moment and that present moment is the seed of all our life. Past is gone, future was not born yet, so here we are.
I’m not gonna talk about Eckhart Tolle today, but something in the title of the post has a slight resemblance to that book, so I wanted to start with a short disambiguation.
I’m going to talk about social media, in fact, and how everything changed into this present moment. Whatever we do now, right now, is more important than everything we already did or everything we set ourselves up to do in the future. The entire energy is concentrated in this very moment, including any reward or financial compensation.
The Money Is (Was?) In The List
Any veteran blogger or internet marketer will tell you that “money is in the list”. Namely, your email list, the one that you build using your blog. If you blog for money (and I urge you to read @dantheman's post on this topic as soon as you can) then the revenue comes not from the blog (surprisingly) but from your email list. Of course, you can make some cash from advertising or sponsored content, but that’s just peanuts, the real revenue comes from your email list. Or so they say.
This approach is based on a few assumptions and on a certain set of verified procedures. Let’s talk about the assumptions first:
- people need time to build a relationship, hence, they won’t buy anything from you on the first encounter, or when they first read some blog of yours
- people live in an information overload chaos, hence you need to repeat the same thing at lest 7 times until they make a note of it in their thoughts flow
- email survived text messages, WhatsApp and SnapChat and, by all means, email is not dead. Yet.
Now let’s see a standard procedure for actually selling something (the complexity varies a lot among different markets, niches and audiences, this is a simplified example)
- first you send an email with a link to a video in which you give significant value to your subscribers
- second, you track those who clicked and saw the video and then you send them another link, with another video in which you give significant value
- third, you track those who clicked and saw the second video and send them another link, with another video in which you give significant value
- fourth, you send a sales letter and actually pitch your product.
- fifth, you cross your fingers and wait
The process is extremely lengthy, energy consuming and unreliable. Please keep in mind that during all this process you still have to provide content for free on your blog, in order to grow your email list.
The Money Is (Will Be?) In The Blockchain
Introducing Steemit. Instead of this long, tedious process, one can see the revenue for a certain blog post in a few hours. No email, no videos, no sequences of stories, no sales pitch. Just write and get money for it.
Say what? Hmmm… What kind of sorcery is that?
Steemit changes the rules of the game in a way which is yet to be understood by the major players in the field. Unfortunately, even the smartest and most intelligent people in the world have their own biases and they will follow the natural human tendency of “going with what works”. In other words, if they know they built a fortune by creating a list of 50.000 subscribers and hammering the hell out of that list with sales pitches, they won’t be interested to look in other areas. If you tell them they can make a lot of money just by writing, they will not believe you. In their world, this is impossible.
But, in a parallel world, this is already happening. Right now, as you read this, we’re both witnessing the same process. There will be real money out of this interaction. I will get an author reward, you will get (if you upvote this article) a curation reward. That money is - for now - in the blockchain, but is as real as any other money in any other bank.
There are many things to be said about why this is possible and why the assumptions on which the old, “email list” based approach, are simply not true anymore, but the most important seems to be for me the “immediocracy”. Or the power of being “in the now”.
The value of any process is dramatically augmented if it happens now. As you read this, your entire attention is focused on this article, and you are in the now. If you want to express your appreciation, you do it now. By knowing the rules of the platform, if you upvote this now, you redirect a part of the reward pool, proportional with your shares in this platform, to this article.
You don’t need to give me your email anymore, I don’t have to make 3 videos, a sales letter and send you a sequence of 4 messages. That will take time. And time is the only currency that we cannot replenish. We cannot print more time. We cannot mint, mine, or generate more time, as we generate coins in the blockchain. Time is a limited resource. The better you use it, the higher its value.
Steemit is the first platform which bridges this huge gap between content providers and their audience. It brings both parties on a territory where they can instantly exchange value. And that territory is “in the now”.
There are many processes yet to be improved in the way Steemit works, and I’m happy to be a part of some of them, but the initial proof of concept has been done. We are part of something so fresh and surprising, that a big part of the established blogosphere can’t even comprehend it right now. Mostly because we, as humans, are wired in such a way that we unconsciously reject what we don’t know.
But as the platform gains more and more momentum, a new field of writers and readers will emerge.
Sometimes, I like to think that they are part of a brand new form of social structure: the immediocracy.
image source - Pixabay
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses