Saul's Armor

A friend--who is a professional musician--commented to me, “You can’t just be a musician anymore—you need to know how to market yourself on the Internet.”

He went on to explain how much effort it takes to write a website—and how cumbersome it is to make any modifications in your existing one. You also need to create a presence on the social media such as Youtube, LinkdIn, etc. and create a lot of cross-links to bring your site higher on the search engines’ queue, so when people Google or Bing for music, your sites are near the first page of hits.

And not just music. You need multiple sites, offering focused services, like:
your consulting service, your instrument sales, your albums, etc. that cross-link with your Facebook, your Twitter, Your SMS, your QR, your Blogspot. Your site citations also, which you have embedded in your text so random queries for certain strings will pull up your page and create awareness—all of these are new tricks that a content provider must learn in order to have a decent competitive chance.

There is also a huge learning curve involved. Not everyone can climb that curve. Skill sets needed for production of content are multiplying like rabbits. Can you do animation or do you need to add more plug-ins that can spice up your sites to get you noticed among the maddering crowds that clog the information superhighways?

And don’t get me started on managing your sites. You need to keep abreast of search engine reconfigurations and how they will impact the number of hits your site generates. You may have to rebuild periodically to keep up with innovations in software, new viruses, new hacker attacks, zombies, malware, sabotage. Even popularity has its perils—when your site gets so many hits, does it crash and leave you non-functional? Are you a target of a competitor's dirty tricks?

Whole industries are blooming that provide a dizzying array of services-–many offered by other working stiffs like yourself in the new cottage industry of innovation. Can you position yourself as a provider of a niche product?

Everybody, it seems, is getting to be a content provider--provided they can bear to assume the panoply of paraphernalia needed to wage the good campaign in the moil and clamor of the electronic marketplace.

Can you even keep current? Media are being created daily. Old utilities are constantly being redesigned. E-mail is already dinosaur-like, even as it supplanted snail mail and telephones. (BTW there’s always new lingo: you are constantly learning new acronyms, new codes with meaningless strings of characters that can sink you if one keystroke is out of place.)

And the demand is like a vast black hole: you keep producing in order to keep in the mix. You have to keep running--like the Red Queen--to keep in place.

Cumbersome? It's the price of doing business. The question is--how much energy do you invest before the point of diminishing returns is passed? There is a steep attrition curve. Those with the resources to meet these challenges have a competitive advantage--until the field evolves in some new, unforeseen modality.

Anyone who contemplates entering the fray should weigh the cost carefully. Consider whether you can carry through.