Attention Economy

Attention is the new currency of our current time. Whoever gets your attention earns the most. Whether it’s through you buying their products, engaging with their content, or watching/reading sponsored posts they make.

People are getting rich off your attention. And so everyone is fighting to get a piece of it—as am I right now with this email you’re reading.

There’s no way around it. You could say it’s wrong, there’s definitely an argument to be made for it. But how are you going to spread your message? How are you going to make an impact and make positive changes in the world? Well, you need to capture attention to spread your message, right?

So everyone trying to make a change in the system has to abide by the rules of the system they’re trying to change. Which makes them quite the hypocrite.

But I’m not here to give you an existential crisis about the state of social media, the attention economy, and society as a whole.

No, I’m here to warn you. Everyone on social media is playing the same game. Everyone.

As with everything, there are evergreen strategies to get engagement and capture attention. One of those is to pick a fight. To choose an enemy and attack them. It can be anything: people, concepts, trends, ideas, beliefs, whatever you want. The more popular, the better. Controversy gets attention. Controversy sells.

So people are fighting all the time. Coffee, morning routines, cold outreach, 4am club, cold showers, cohorts, daily emails, meditation, tweet templates, platitudes, ‘authenticity’, storytelling, copywriting, 18-year-old life coaches, seriously the list goes on.

This is the cycle of social media: Something rises in popularity → A lot of people talk highly about it → It becomes hugely popular → people start attacking it for attention → attacking it becomes popular → the thing itself is unpopular again → people start defending it again because now that’s the ‘unpopular’ thing to do (which gets attention) → it becomes popular again. And the cycle repeats.

What I’m trying to say it that you’ll always have people hating everything on social media. You might say people just don’t ever agree on something. And sure that’s part of it.

But there’s more to it.

It literally pays to start new fights and pick new enemies.

What’s the way to get out of this mess? Building your own world. Doing your own thing.

The #1 worst mistake you can make is to listen to other people’s advice. Seriously.

Experiment with stuff you come across, get inspired by others, try stuff you think is cool, and stick with it.

Don’t let other people tell you what you can post and what you can’t. Don’t let other people tell you what’s going to make you successful and what won’t. And don’t let other people tell you how many emails you can send before people ‘get annoyed’ at you. Test it out and go see it for yourself.

If you think sending daily emails sounds stupid, boring, a waste of time, then don’t listen to me and do your own thing. But if you think sending daily emails to get paid sounds cool, exciting, and something you’d like to test out for yourself, then check out Email Valhalla here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Once came a Reddit post titled “Are newsletters better than social media following?”

It went as follows:

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I see a lot of talk about newsletters on here and am about to publish my first (and possibly only) book. As I consider how to connect with readers and what to put as a hook to connect at the end of the book, I was wondering… isn’t social media more engaging than newsletters? Would an invitation to follow a FB page, for example, not be more effective at regularly having a dialog? Why or why not?

I appreciate you guys being willing to share your experience with a newb like me.

===

Short answer: email is superior in every way

Longer answer: Take a look at this and think about how “useful” this is.

You create a Facebook page, Instagram profile, Twitter account—or whatever social media you prefer—and invite all of your readers, customers, and other folks interested in your stuff to follow your profile.

Then, even though you’ve already got them to follow you (a difficult step on it’s own) you’ll still have to compete against hundreds of other people (friends, family, influencers, theme pages, other businesses,…) to get the attention of your followers whenever they happen to doomscroll (or zoomerscroll) through their homepage—most of the time while taking a dump at work to avoid working.

And as if that alone wasn’t enough.

If you do happen to grab their attention, then god forbid if you want to show them something nice, guide them to a new product of yours (a podcast you were on, a new YouTube video, your latest book, or even a free novella as a gift) because you will be heavily punished by the platform for “sending traffic away” aka, including a link that points to anywhere else but the social media you’re using.

Hell, let alone if someone doesn’t like something you post and decides to report you. With how today’s social landscape is looking, that could easily mean a total loss of your profile (losing everything you’ve worked for in the process).

You don’t even have to piss someone off to have it happen to you.

Many creators get their accounts banned or closed for no reason at all (and trust me because I’m one of them).

Long story short, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Using email as the main form of communication between you and your customers is the only certainty and security you’ll ever have.

Make sure you’re using it.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about all things email-related, then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla