Marketing By Teaching and Sharing

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

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