

Marketing By Teaching and Sharing - sthomps
http://blog.sokanu.com/marketing-by-teaching-and-sharing

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10ren
_The best chefs always leave something out of the recipe they teach_ (is this
true?) - but they are still teaching valuable cooking skills, just not their
signature dishes.

When my business was starting out, I read that the best way to get a high
ranking on Google was to provide something valuable. So I published the
results of my research (in my area), competing products and so on, and tried
to explain the field and the issues, as I best understood them. Not with the
attitude of promoting my product, but of promoting the field (I happen to
really enjoy teaching and explaining, so this was a happy coincidence). I got
massive pagerank from this, in that I always beat institutions and world
famous brand-names that happened to have the same acronym as my product
(unbeknownst to me).

tl;dr _teaching is SEO_

I once asked a law professor who specialized in IP law, wrote the standard IP
textbook etc (in Australia, a "professor" is the top academic position, not
just a teacher), about the best way to protect ones copyright in something (I
was thinking maybe: get it certified, post it to yourself, register it
somewhere etc). He said to publish it as widely as possible, so everyone knows
it was yours.

What I gained from this video is that people will _like_ you for teaching
them. They would have formed a sort of emotional connection with my
business/me because of that - which explains the good reactions I got. This
makes sense, because when someone teaches me something valuable, I tend to
want to have a talisman or token of them, to capture their mentoring of me. A
_mentor_ is a powerful concept, that taps into our notions of parent-child,
doctor-patient, teacher-student, god-man. In movies and books, they are
prominent; audiences really like them.

tl;dr _mentors are loved_

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sthomps
Sorry if there were any times when the site was down. I was updating the theme
while this was posted. Thanks!

