Brand promotion and recognition is probably one of main benefits of social and multimedia marketing. But, if you don’t have a solid base to start from you’re unlikely to get very far. It’s kind of like someone opening a local hot dog stand and thinking they’ll be the next Nathan’s overnight. The reality is that there’s a lot of hard work between these two points and adding in the technical and artistic challenges to multimedia to the mix make it even more daunting for the average person.

As for multimedia, yes it is popular, but just as horses are still popular, would you expect to earn cash online selling buggy whips? Frank Kern is charismatic and does some massive traffic generation using video but the video is a flashy tool for some very clever underlying traditional tactics, and he uses sophisticated expensive equipment and deliery, not viable for the beginner. Can anyone use a Flip video with bad sound and expect similar results?

Remember the guy who lip-synched ‘Numa Numa’? His YouTube video has 23 million views but I doubt he has made a penny from it.

As an online marketing beginner I marvel at the successes possible but struggle with the ways to get there. That makes me easy prey for any new ‘how to make money online’ gambit. Thanks for your honest opinion.

The way I look at things is that for a flagship blog one has to build a foundation on search engines, primarily Google, and then branch out into doing social and multimedia marketing, niche marketing, product creation and marketing or whatever direction they want to go. That way they have a good solid base of traffic, probably 1000+ unique search visitors a day if done right. I think this foundation is something that’s critical and that seems to be missing in your model for the beginning blogger.

Not everyone is talented enough to do multimedia well, something that become readily apparent if you dig around YouTube a bit. Perhaps your membership site can give some people who have an interest but lack skills a chance to improve and that’s a good thing.

Just read your review.

Thanks for the honest feedback. I really appreciate it. Sometimes it’s difficult to get people’s true opinions – and there certainly are a lot of opinions going around about The Roadmap at the moment.

I also appreciate the fact that you read through the whole report and was able to find at least something useful (”The third, Test Your Market, has a good suggestion in it and that’s to create multiple blogs to test out markets”).

I think the report is definitely aimed at beginners, so more seasoned bloggers wont be too surprised with what they find inside the first part.

But that’s ok. I was expecting that.

Although, I do think that there are some useful tips in the second part of the report for all bloggers. Social and multimedia is not going away, so we might as well embrace it and make a start on it now.

And OK, perhaps I could have provided some more detail, you are right. But it was only my first edition, and thanks to your honest review and feedback from others, I’ll be able to add some more useful gems for our target market in the future.

So, once again, thanks a lot for the review. You gave me a few great things to think about

All the best for your blogging efforts!

Gideon Shalwick