ThePowerMoves positioning: moving away from "summaries"
If you search "The Power Moves" online, this is what you get:
"book summaries" is the first hyperlink.
And "best books" is in there as well.
If I put the website URL on some website analyzing tools, many of the "competitors" or "similar" websites show up as being book summary websites.
And I don't like that.
Why summaries is a bad positioning for ThePowerMoves.com
One, because it doesn't reflect what most users visit this website for.
And second, and most of all, because the positioning as a book summary repository overshadows the true value of ThePowerMoves.com.
There is plenty of new social technology, new concepts, and new insights on learning social dynamics that have been introduced by ThePowerMoves.com. And that's where the real added value of this website lies.
Summarizing books is a relatively low-value service, especially the way that some other websites do it, without reviewing or ever criticizing the content.
Being clustered with those websites hides the true value of ThePowerMoves.com.
Fixing ThePowerMoves.com Positioning
So I have removed the page "book summaries", as a link in the top menu.
As well as I have removed "book reviews" and "best books".
Now the interactive page remains on the main menu, which I publicly renamed "resources".
That should send a signal to Google that "summaries" is not the highest priority for this website, which in turn should lead Google to remove the page as their first hyperlink.
Furthermore, I have been removing the word "summary" from some of the review titles, using instead "notes".
Or sometimes I went for a title that is a summary of the review. See here an example:
Instead of writing "summary", I imply right away, straight from the title, that it's BS that most men like bitches.
To me, that's value-adding reviewing.
It will take time to change all, or even most, of this website's reviews. But it's OK, this is important for the website's positioning, but not super high priority.
I'm also thinking of dropping some more summaries.
For example, I dropped the summary of "The Secret", a nonsense crap that tells people to think and expect things to manifest in their lives instead of planning and working to make things happen.
I'm thinking of doing the same for all the similar books based on woo-woo, and some other books I think are a time waste. I'd still keep the reviews on the "book reviews" page though.
If anyone has any feedback on this, I'm happy to read.
From now on the reviews will not have tag titles -the ones you see clickable in the "contents" section- such as "summary", "review", "pros", and "cons", but it will contain the main takeaways from the resource being reviewed.
This is both to give more weight to the content, and to highlight that the reviews are more a way to condense and analyze useful information (rather than acritically summarizing information).
For example, see the latest review "Dataclysm".
I do understand and respect your position regarding this matter. However, I can't help but feel this is a bit of a shame. The Power Moves book summaries/book reviews are the very best available. Not only are the summaries very high quality, but you offer takeaways from a lot of very interesting books that are not well known and are not summarized elsewhere. Perhaps you could give consideration to creating a separate book summary website/service?
Thank you for your feedback and kind words, SS.
I haven't re-read all the previous messages, so it's very possible I didn't communicate this properly.
The reviews aren't going anywhere.
It's how they are called/presented/formatted/promoted (or not promoted) that changes.
It's the bad or average books/courses that aren't going to get a full feature anymore.
And I think that's a good thing for everyone. Even as a reader of the review, those poorer books/courses are taking too much of your time, while giving back too little (value-taking). Or, at the very least, there are better alternatives that can give you more.
Even poorer books/courses still enter the "list" page though, so people can look them up and read a quick snippet of why there might be better resources for them out there.
The good ones are still getting a full feature (preparing a right now a review for a "A Billion Wicked Thoughts" as a matter of fact).
And, of course, still getting teased out with practical examples and strategies to find their way into the website material, either articles or products (I'm always taking notes of great wisdom, and might sync with Ali later to include a lesson/review in CU of Ramit's best work).
Edit:
Actually, I've just thought of expanding the reviews to include YouTube channels / podctasts.
Thanks for indirectly prodding me in that direction :).
Sharing an update.
6 months later, I think it was a successful effort.
Not exactly the results I'd put in there, but searching for "The Power Moves" gives a very different feel now:
Potentially even too successful.
Right now all the top 20 pages by visits of this website are own-produced articles, so not a single review.
Edit: except for "best of" compilations. Interestingly, it's "best books on manipulation" that is up there.
In the top 50 pages there are maybe 5-6 reviews.
I think many reviews are solid, with plenty of insights, and might deserve a higher place, but overall... It was an interesting experiment and the original goal was accomplished.
I forgot to share this because I got the idea at an inconvenient time.
I think Literature would be a suitable word to use.
Literature also implies that you do literature reviews which connotes a different standard from book summaries.
Literature reviews include comprehensive cross-referencing, analysis, data, and all the other rigorous scientific approaches.
It puts you on the level of APA and other repositories of research papers.
Although I think putting in more textbooks and research papers would give the feeling (& also tangible analysis) of scientific rigour.
(I did see that there are a few textbooks.)
Thank you so much, Matthew, that's a golden idea!
As for the zombie approach, a few things that are stopping from changing it right away:
- All the existing links to the "reviews" section would throw out errors
- People reading "literature" might not click on it and get lost
But still an awesome idea, mulling it over somehow.