Book Review: Confessions of an Online Hustler by Matt Forney

Buy the book here.

Matt Forney: a man who trolls for a living.

Except that’s not really true.  Despite his penchant for provocative titles, Forney is an extremely thoughtful writer.  His titles might provoke outrage amongst the twittering classes (The Case Against Female Self-Esteem for instance), but the actual pieces are rather erudite in their argumentation and analysis.

This holds true with his recently-updated Confessions of an Online Hustler: if you go into it expecting instructions on how to run an online scam à la Four Hour Workweek you’ll be disappointed.  While Forney is certainly not averse to using the full spectrum of online marketing techniques, he knows perfectly well that there’s no such thing as a get-rich-quick scheme, and he’s not about to pretend that there is just to sell a book.

Confessions is a step-by-step set of instructions on how to become a “professional blogger”.  Make no mistake: blogging effectively is a lot of work (even if you can do it in your underwear), and there are no short-cuts to success.  If writing is just a hobby for you, don’t even bother, but if you are thinking about writing on a professional, or semi-professional basis (after all, if you’re going to be writing anyway, you might as well be earning beer-money) then this is the book for you.

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, “Well gosh Matt, this stuff can’t be that hard! All you do is write!”

If you think like that, I’ll bet you’re the same kind of person who looks at the percussionist in a band and thinks, “Man, drumming can’t be hard! All that guy does is hit things with sticks!”

Approach writing with that mentality and you won’t last two weeks, let alone long enough to receive some recognition for your efforts.

Forney covers everything from the basics to the advanced: how to improve your writing, how to set up a website and run WordPress, different networking opportunities, how to deal with haters, and what your options are for making money– more importantly, which ones work, and which ones don’t.  Forney’s run a number of different websites in his time (not all of which you’re aware of), and if anyone’s an authority on the matter, it’s him.  Quite frankly, I learned a few things from his book, and this stuff is old-hat to me; just take a look at this website.

Note: one of the things he writes about (and he’s done his homework analyzing traffic data) is that blogrolls are almost useless for sending people traffic, and that they’re very much a “2010” sort of a thing.  These days, Social Media dominates, and blogrolls are a largely-useless eyesore.  That’s why I took my own down last week, but it turned out that a few readers were still relying on it – so it’s back up temporarily, and if you want, grab the data now, because I’ll be pulling it next week for good.  Check out Feedly to keep track of your own RSS feeds, that’d be my recommendation.

Confessions will give you an excellent analysis of both the tactics and the strategy to writing in the new millennium, and if you’re going to write in any sort of a semi-serious manner, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this book.  Remember – marketing your writing is as much of a part of writing, as typing out the words themselves.  Anybody can make poetry and hide it in a drawer – getting it in front of people is incumbent upon the true poet.

As a final note – it’s interesting how much somebody’s writing says about them.  Not just how they write, but what they choose to write about.  Forney’s writing paints a picture, whether he wants it to or not.  It demonstrates who he is on the inside.  In The Four Hour Work Week Ferris bragged about becoming a kickboxing-champion in South East Asia, by bending the rules to go down a weight class, and then exploiting the fact that pushing people out of the arena gives one the victory, even if they are the lesser warrior… not exactly cheating, but not exactly a victory, either.  In Confessions Forney writes about all the honest and decent ways to become a widely-read blogger.  He doesn’t shy away from occasionally provoking a fight for traffic, or of making judicious use of hashtags to popularize something, but at no point does he “cheat” to get a bunch of free views.

In other words – Matt Forney, choleric as he might be, is a man of integrity.  Buy his book.