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.