[impaul99]

I've got a question for you Steve. I'm kind of at a unique point in my life right now. I'm now ready to move forward and to really start expressing my creative side as talked about in your last Podcast.

I have found a personal development niche where I've always had a passion in and I know I can offer a lot to people within it. My challenge right now is that I don't know which medium to choose. Since I've been running a blog for a long time now, the natural tendency for me is to start a blog on the topic and just go nuts.

However, lately I've been looking at a lot of blogs out there and I'm starting to wonder if Blogging is the best medium to share this kind of information. I mean, you've been rather successful at it making $40k/month or whatever now, but we aren't really comparing it to anything else. For example, perhaps if you would have written a Book instead of launching a Blog, you could be making $400k/month for example.

The amount of money/month is irrelevant, I'm simply speaking about the most effective approach. For example, here are some "bad things" I've identified with sharing personal development within in a blog comparing it to lets say a book:

(1) A reader who encounters your blog will read the LATEST entry, and that entry might first require them to understand 10 other background posts that relate to that entry. FInding the specific background posts is often difficult on a blog.

(2) A reader doesn't get the benefit of progressive understanding. Meaning, unless the reader started reading your blog on day 1 of launch and is still reading it today, old posts are often "discarded" or forgotten about because people want to know the "newest stuff". A lot of times this hurts them because they dont' understand the fundamentals enough yet.

It's almost like going to a martial arts class and the teacher only teaches Black Belt Classes right now. He used to teach white belt stuff when he was a white belt, and you can watch video's of it if you want, but if you show up to class today, you train with the black belts and you try to keep up or die.

(3) A Blog limits you to the amount of text you can write to present an idea, whereas a book could take up the whole book to make a single important point. For example an evolutionary book model can guide the reader through the adventures of a young hero towards learning a very important lesson at the end. A blog might not be the best idea for that.

(4) Steve, there is a $5,000 seminar happening this weekend in Los Vegas that I'd like to give you a pair of free tickets for. See how that automatically implies value? Compare that to: Steve, I'd like to offer you a few words of free advice. What's free advice worth?

See how the two statements change your automatic reaction? I know it's dumb, but humans kind of have this thing where if they pay for something it's valuable, but if they get it for free, it's not.

Would your readers value your content more if they had to pay for it?

(5) I have found quite a few blogs that have 10-15 GOOD ARTICLES buried between 100 "mediocre" posts. The 100 "mediocre" posts are there to keep the blog going to keep RSS subscriptions active etc., but really they just make it difficult to find the "good stuff" in a blog.

I'm seeing blog authors doing the "Best of ___________" thing. WOuld it not be more effective to ONLY have BEST OF posts on your website (even if it no longer qualifies as a BLOG then), and then drive traffic and present those articles only? OR better yet, to put them together into a cohesive eBook or Printed book?

(6) As another example, I often recommend books to people. I've also recommended your blog to many people. The problem is that when I tell people to go to your site because I know there is an article they might be interested in, they sometimes go to your site and encounter a few articles that they have no interest in (ie. Polyphasic sleep) and then leave.

Because there is so much content on your site, a referal to it is like referring someone to "WikiPedia" for example. Whereas if I look at an Author like Deepak Chopra I can recommend a SPECIFIC BOOK by him to someone and the will get the info they are looking for.

As you can see, all of these "bad parts" to a blog will also have equally good points to them as well. My challenge is how to figure out what medium to use.

eBook? Charge people $25 for it so that they actually READ IT, and it gives them all the info. (Could also be a free ebook)

Free Blog? Will they find the right article for them at the right time? Will it make sense to them without reading all the other background info?


I'll give one final example. At lunch today I was talking to a friends brother. I was talking to him about an experiment where a knee surgeon did surgery on people's knees and found that a placebo group who only had their skin cut and stiched back up had the same % of recovery as a group who had their knees operated on (Bone shaved, fluids drained etc.) The problem is that he is currently in university and totally being taught "common science" and he doesn't see the possibility of this type of thing working. For example he said that it's a FACT that bone and cartilage doesn't regrow. THat's what he was told in school and by his doctor. That's why they people's cartilage in the knees wears out and disappears.

My point is that he hasn't even been taught the difference between a FACT and a BELIEF yet, so me telling him about the knee surgery placebo experiment makes no sense to him. It would have been more productive for me to speak to him about the possibility that there are things out there that we consider facts, and doctors consider facts, thare are actually just beliefs and in a lot of cases false beliefs. A few minutes on the Internet brought up lots of research and experiments showing that cartilage CAN in fact be regrown, but he's never heard of this.

What would you suggest as a process for selecting the best medium for my message Steve?