I’ve read quite a big amount all kind of guides during last year or so. E-books and blogs, about photography business and it’s marketing, social media strategies, how-to-write-blogs blogs etc.etc.

I started this lesson mainly because of curiosity. I was sceptic about all these marketing speeches of marketing speeches, you know – “by reading my amazing book your success is guaranteed 110% and you reach wealth, health, and everything you didn’t even know you wanted!”. Sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t want to judge beforehand, but see if there was some wisdom behind stupid phrases or not.

Also, it was an process of searching the valuable information. Today finding it usually means that one has to go through a lot of not so valuable information – a curse of net age, there are no gate-keepers on this information superhighway.

But sure there was also little suspicion that something big was happening, and I was dropped out of it, didn’t know about it, didn’t understand it.

Anyway, I wanted to know and so I started to read. What did I found?

Not much actually. I wasn’t missing any big wave. There wasn’t much new information or real strategies. Most of these amazing secrets were just simple common sence things.

Some information about processes of search engines and opimization was new and interesting. But after all, ranking well in Google search means ranking well in Google search. It doesn’t automatically mean success in any measurements. And that optimization side right away raised the question who is the audience – if you’re writing a blog optimized for Google you’re probably writing quite boring blog. Search engine algorithms are not very well known for their respect of literal culture and well written stories. How often you’ve found that that fourth or fifth article behind that first one you found on Google was better written, more informative? My own aswer: all the time. If the things we put into the web, were they photographs or texts or something else, don’t have originality and creative qualities they won’t gain much interest, popularity, interaction or feedback, no matter how well they are optimized and keyworded.

Did I found blogs and books I would recommend?

No, not really, to be honest. Some were better than others, of course, but I didn’t found any that I would really want to recommend for other people. This isn’t rocket science. By thinking and using the knowledge you already have (analyzing a bit your own behaviour in web is very good starting point) you’ll probably be as ready for hitting the information superhighway as by reading miracle promising books and blogs.