That was a question I was asked in yesterday’s comments. It needed a bigger reply than another comment would allow, so here goes.

Differentiating yourself as a digital publisher can be broken down into five steps :

1. Find a niche that works.
2. Build credibility.
3. Give away a lot — except the inner secrets.
4. Genuinely have inner secrets.
5. Always be exceptional.

#1. Finding a niche that works is harder than you might think. Most of the niches that work are now maxed out with major operators. Therefore a niche that does work may turn out to be a niche that did work, but no longer does.

Take the biggest online niche of all : Making Money Online. This was the first Big Thing on the internet. Remember all those email newsletters and the never ending surge of autoresponder emails urging you to sign up — “hit ‘em seven times to win a customer”? It was all built on affiliate income and the numbers game of playing with percentages.

It seems so dated now, yet the basic principles still work because they resonate with human nature — which changes only very slowly over geological time.

Problogging is the modern equivalent : creating content for Adsense clicks. Again, it’s a numbers game and the niche is important. It’s the old methodology but with a fresh lick of paint for the New Media generation.

To find a niche that works, I apply the TLA test. Some sites (blogs, if you like) sell out on text link ads very quickly. Others, with the same or more traffic don’t. It’s the best indicator I know of whether a niche will work online or not. Try it on 10 ideas, each with a different site. Get PR, submit to the TLA site, stand back and watch the winners and losers. Eliminate the losers.

#2. Building credibility as a writer and publisher is essential if you’re going to sell digital products. That product may be blog posts to attract advertising, or ebooks that sell direct. Let’s concentrate on the ebooks as the blog/Adsense thing has been more than adequately covered.

If you want to sell an ebook that you’re writing yourself, you first have to establish yourself as an author; as a dispenser of accurate information; and as a reliable picker of techniques that no-one else can match.

That’s a tall order, but what did you expect? Only 5 percent of aspirants ever succeed in any enterprise. They do because they have talent — why would you choose to be a digital publisher if you didn’t? And they have grit — they are prepared to stick to the task until they succeed.

You build credibility the slow way, using the old publishers’ dictum : show don’t tell.

Don’t keep telling everyone how wonderful you are — show them. Write something that arrests their attention. Keep writing something that continues to arrest their attention. Nothing else matters but that.

#3. In other words, give away a lot, freely and without flinching. Look at Darren Rowse at Problogger.net. He pours forth his bounty with great abandon every day, and it’s all the product of having actually done the job himself. His readers know that, so they give him the benefit of the doubt and stay attached.

Imagine if Darren released an ebook : The Definitive Problogger — All the Inner Secrets of Making Money Online and From Your Blog. It may only contain what he has written many times before but is now diffused all over his site. But people won’t see it that way. It would sell.

The most recent legend is the 37Signals ebook which took over $30,000 on its first day. They had established their reputation as providers of simple, small-scale software solutions that worked. They had the credibility. They offered access to the inner sanctum.

Giving away a lot of your experience is the only way to establish that kind of credibility. But always keep a little back — what in the publishing trade is known as The Killer Fact.

#4. Inner Secrets or Killer Facts are rarely as potent as they sound. But you must have a few, especially if you give the impression that they’re there in the inner sanctum.

For example, in my forthcoming book, The Syntagma Story, there are 37 killer facts, each one bigger than the one before.

See what I mean, you’re reaching for your credit card before I can get these words onto the screen.

#5. Always be exceptional. Never follow the trend or the crowd.

A farmer I knew once complained that European Union subsidies were useless because once they were announced for a particular crop, every farmer in Western Europe would start growing them, and in two years there would be a massive glut. At that stage the loss from the crop would greatly exceed the cash subsidy.

Think long-term, avoid the Gadarene rush to The Next Big Thing.

* Build credibility.
* Discharge your inner secrets in your commercial products.
* Do a great job.
* Always be exceptional.

Since last evening, Syntagma has received around 700 spam comments, all of which ended up in our moderation panel.

A large majority of them begin : “Actually i am not an active serfer [sic] …” Well, they could have fooled me.

This has been going on for more than a week. Since none of them has got past the spam traps even for a millisecond, may I suggest these people save a little on their electricity bills and find something productive to do.

Anyone else having problems with this spammer?

Update : In the three minutes it’s taken to write this post, another 10 “Actually’s” have appeared in the panel. It’s a Biblical plague.

By its nature, Superdemocracy (SD) uses dynamic flows of energy to create its systems, rather than by assessing the people in aggregated-responsibility positions, i.e., jobs.

If that seems more akin to magic than conventional analysis, it is.

Most jobs have large legacy pots comprising fixed areas of responsibility, usually maintained by protectionist clutter like trade union demarcations, “Spanish practices”, and just sheer inertia. Sometimes a job title is so all-embracing that it is difficult to see the absurdities embedded in it. The UK “Home Secretary” is a case in point.

Looking instead at the dynamic patterns of operation within any organization — the decisions that alter and influence the flow — and determining the Points of Maximum Competence for the execution of those decisions, results in a very different picture of how a system of management works.

Mystics have always known that there are forces at work in the world that are unseen by a vast majority of us. Many view them as “causes and effects” too complicated to be fully understood. Some recognize the essential energies of life at work and know that they are influenced and driven by thought.

Since the mechanism is invisible to most people, the outcomes are largely hit and miss. We build great edifices of operational superstructure to prevent certain outcomes arising by chance : laws, constitutions, training regimes, constant supervision, regulations, red tape. All this saps the energy of every organization and makes it largely unworkable without considerable effort and cost.

By mapping the energy flows against the outcomes that exist, it is possible to refine the plan of the enterprise. This may or may not be a necessary first stage for success.

But simply isolating the decisions that need to be made and ensuring they are taken at the Points of Maximum Competence, regardless of job title or seniority, will turn round a business or government more quickly than any inbuilt rigidities, such as plans, maps, layouts or constitutions. My thesis is that these Points are nearly always far below where the decisions are currently taken, especially in governmental systems.

That is why I say that SD is more like magic — the influencing of hidden forces to secure an identified outcome — than any other presently known methodology.

The next point is to identify the hierarchy of decisionmaking : purely local decisions, middle-point decisions, and over-arching, strategic decisions. Of course, under Superdemocracy, a lot of strategic shibboleths are revealed to be worthless, merely underpinning a false position of authority. Pseudo-authority is a major part of the SD analaysis.

More over at Superdemocracy – The Art of Corporate Governance.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, we’re hearing that b5media is relocating its offices across Toronto. Our information suggests they are going up in the world, leaving their two-man basement for a three-man cave.

Can it really be true that a “major blog network”, funded by venture capital, is operating from a cave? Well, Jeremy says so. It must be true. What humility.

Here at Syntagma, we have obtained the first footage of the entire b5 team of ten hard at work in their new cave :

Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen?

In complete contrast, Syntagma Media has from the beginning worked out of the palatial, Grade 1-listed pile of Syntagma Towers, pictured below :

In case you’re wondering, the figure in the foreground is yours truly, kneeling in thanks for our good fortune. What you don’t see are the hordes of paparazzi gathered beneath the battlements.

And just to quash the latest rumour : no, Kate Middleton doesn’t work for us. She’s just joined the b5ers in their cave.

Warning : This is totally off-topic and is inspired by yesterday’s news of the rapidly disintegrating state of the British Home Office under Tony Blair’s pitiful administration.

It’s not a rant though. Promise. Just a look at the Panglossian fantasies that drive British policy nowadays : “Everything for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.

I work hard at not writing about blogging these days, but something always turns up and I’m forced to relent. This one is irresistible for a number of reasons.

Keith Waterhouse is a British National Treasure. He’s incredibly old, being the author of that 1950s smash hit novel and film, Billy Liar. He claimed to be one of the “Angry Young Men” — all the rage in those days — but his sense of humour prevented him ever being angry enough.

He went on to become a very good journalist and playwright, defender of the apostrophe (everyone’s entitled to some eccentricity), and author of a long-running column in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.

And it’s to the latter we turn for his views on blogging. Yesterday, he published a piece titled, “Blogging our way to the true story”.

He begins characteristically : “And a happy blogging New Year to bloggers everywhere. I don’t think.” That’s Keith for you. Sharp and to the point.

He continues, “Meaning I cannot be doing with blogging, bloggers or blogs.” He quotes an example of a typical Christmas blog : “Tarquin, as well as being Head Boy, is now First Triangle in the school orchestra, which gives him a place in next year’s Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Bowl all-schools production of Peter and the Wolf.”

But even worse, he says, is the rise of the grandiosely termed Citizen Journalism. “They print hearsay as hard fact. They lift news items from orthodox sources and embellish them in their own wild words. They twist the newspaper writer’s motto, which is Get It First, Get It Right, to read : Get It Second, Get It Wrong.”

Blimey, someone’s rattled his cage. I hope it wasn’t me.

But he has a solution to this morass of unseemly garbage into which he despatches all bloggers : “To all pejorative references to the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ please add : ‘– unless they have a camera’. … I make an exception in the case of photographs.”

Here he goes on at length about the Saddam Hussein execution : “The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage … was grisly enough. The bloggers’ contribution — grabbed at the gallows … shocked all right thinking people. … the sheer brutality of the scene takes[s] us back to the public hanging of felons at Tyburn in the 18th century.”

In other words, blogging is OK so long as it tells us a truth that mainstream media is locked out from. Bloggers are forever condemned to be bandits and outlaws, stealing banned information and news of private events that the law and other agencies try to conceal from us.

Well, it’s a tidy gap in the market, if a bit hard to live up to on a daily basis. If this is the view of an old-time journalist and general good egg, blogging does suffer from an image problem. But then, we’ve been saying that here for a long time.

I can’t help feeling that if Waterhouse rewrote Billy Liar for our times, Billy would be a blogger.

Many thanks to those of you who, in response to my previous post, sent emails full of ideas and advice. Most of it was very helpful, and assisted me in making up my mind.

Which is : I’ve decided that I’m going to cut back on my current workload, get my two books finished by new year, then pile into the project over the winter.

I’ll start modestly, see how it goes, take advice, then commit resources as needed, including quite a bit of outsourcing. All this will take place behind the scenes, so nothing will be visible until mid-2007.

My instinct told me I should go for broke on this one, but in the second year of the business I’m looking for profitability rather than endless expansion.

When you reach a certain age — 19 nowadays — you’re allowed to reminisce a little about your past. Not that I’m anything like 19, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Here’s a picture of the first national (UK) magazine I edited : Network User, all about telecoms and aimed at IT managers of major players like the banks, the London Stock Exchange and others of similar corporate weight.

I developed Network User from a small newsletter called simply, Network. The ugly brute of a burglar on the cover was actually our esteemed designer, Richard Downer, whose previous work included the famous illustrations on the front of Post Office telephone directories.

While we were shooting that pic, he was terrified the police would arrest him for attempted robbery. We had our replies ready : “No officer, I’ve never seen that man in my life.” — at least, that’s what we told him afterwards.

Looking through the magazine now, I still feel almost the same rush of heady excitement as seeing it for the first time, hot off the presses. Maybe because I’m a bit older, but I don’t quite get that same thrill when I look at anything I’ve done online.

Why? It’s too easy.

We sweated blood over that first issue of Network User in a way internet folk can’t imagine unless they’ve done it themselves.

We had a huge budget, employed the best people in their fields, were paid large salaries and had the run of late 1980s London, a place literally sizzling with excitement — probably something like Silicon Valley in its heyday.

Those were the days. We were Monarchs of all we surveyed and drove all before us. Champions, indeed.

But even great decades run their course. The flashy 80s were replaced by the boring 90s, and I headed to an isolated farmhouse in southern Spain with a nice view of Gibraltar and the Med. There I spent my time writing philosophy and growing avocados, apricots and figs.

Returning to England seven years later and wondering what to do with myself, I fell into the Web and blogging and started doing much the same as I’d done before. That is, producing network magazines.

So events turn full circle in the end. What creatures of habit we are.

Matt Craven has just announced in The Blog Herald that BlogMedia Inc is rebadging itself, Problogging Inc and effectively selling off its blog network brick by brick. It’s unclear right now whether they mean to sell The Blog Herald, Blog Network Watch and Blog Network List as well.

On their other site, Problogging.com, Matt writes in more detail :

“As many of you have noted over the past few weeks, we’ve slowly been divesting ourselves of much of our blog network. This is part of a deliberate strategy to move beyond the “wide & deep” network strategy that we have employed in the past in order to refocus our efforts on our consulting business and expand more into services for professional bloggers, including directly consulting in that arena.”

As I’ve written here many times, I believe the blog network concept was over-egged because Weblogs Inc was seen as a network rather than two superstar tech websites. The charge out of this space is becoming more like a stampede. As I write, Steve Rubel is asking whether Weblogs Inc itself will survive within AOL now that Jason Calacanis has left.

From Syntagma Media’s point of view, we have not been a blog network for quite a while, converting to a publisher of Network Magazines some months ago. We look forward to a buoyant future.