Failure is Job One: Micah Baldwin says “Go to the SEO panel”

Tony Adams of Yahoo SEO etc is on the other panel on SEO; Micah suggests that we go there. Micah says he’s lived a lot of failure so I guess he’s an expert. He thinks so. The idea behind the session as I understand it is to use failure to our advantage, to learn from it. He’s starting with video of Michael Jordan talking about all the ways he’s failed which concludes with “This is why I succeed.”

His own story has to do with twitter. He’s the one who started Follow Fridays. After he sent out a tweet that said he was the antiChrist of twitter–follow him and lose 10 followers. So he started Follow Friday.

now everyone hate me

That’s his typo.

He started Follow Friday because he was failing at trying to get people to follow people who he thought were interesting. He learned that failure is a process.

What he’s also learned: that failure leads to success.

BTW, I’m tweeting his talk too. So I might miss some of his talk here but you can see it on my twitter feed…you are following me, right?

OK, here’s some tweets:

• Micah Baldwin: failure is an event; a loser is a person #wordcampLA
• Micah Baldwin: In America it’s ok to fail. It’s a cardinal sin to be a loser. #wordcampLA
• @micah sometimes the best way to duck is to get punched in the face

As Hugh McLeod puts it in one of his cartoons, But what if I fail? We get to laugh at you.

So what is it that denotes success or failure?
1. Understand what it is, what it means, to be successful or fail.
2. Measure your success and your failures.
3. Anticipate success and prepare for it.

Three rules of blogging:
1. Write like no one is reading
2. Write when you want.
3. The moment that you think to yourself, “Wow, this would make a good blog post” is the exact moment you become a blogger.

How do you measure success as a blogger? He decided having 1000 subscribers would be it for him, make it worth it, make it seem worthwhile, that what he was doing has value. But the tipping point was getting 100 subscribers. He now has 2300.

Here’s the link to the presentation: http://slideshare.net/micahb

Q & A included: personal branding is trust, and is reflective of you at the end of the day. For SEO, have one blog, your personal purposes, have multiple blogs.