Here’s an edited excerpt of what he taught in his Mixergy program. (Download the full program to get the complete lesson.)
If you show them something and you deny the market, you’re going to get caught. Journalists are smart. So when we launched Mahalo Answers, the first thing I did is say: “Here are the top 5 Answer sites out there. Here’s Yahoo! Answers. Here’s wiki.answers.com. And here’s Naver.com that you might not know about. They’re in Korea. Here’s the competitive landscape. Here’s everything I learned about knowledge exchanges.
“Here’s what we’re doing that’s different. We realize that knowledge exchanges exist. We realize they’ve been a tremendous success in terms of traffic. We realize that they haven’t been a tremendous success in terms of quality. So we want to make something that’s a lot higher quality.
“Here’s how we’re doing that. We have a virtual currency. Nobody’s ever done that. We have multi-media-style answers. Where you could put in images and videos and audio files. And we have a curation team that deletes bad answers or obnoxious answers, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. We pay them $10 per hour. They work from home. And so the best way to make the quality of a site go up is to get rid of the misspellings and the bad stuff.”
And what I just told you in 30 seconds is exactly what I told people over a 20-minute session–with examples. Showing not telling. I don’t have the ability to show you right now. I would if we were sitting in front of a computer. That same process hold true with a journalist.
And have something of significance. If you don’t have something of significance, you don’t want to waste their time.