Next on the docket for "Fuel" promotion: press releases

... sent out to the world via my list of online press release services. I've got a collection of these services, all of which offer free services (or advanced features for a fee), and now I've got to craft a press release to send out about the "Fuel" Virtual Book Tour... and "Fuel" of course.

The pressure's on now, because I just sent out an announcement to my personal contacts list about my projects, and if I did my job and piqued their interest, they're going to be watching my work and waiting for me to do what I intend to do.

It's a good thing, actually, 'cause it keeps me on track. After working in solitude for so many years, I got used to not having an external party to answer to, in my own work. I could build my websites and write my stories/essays/poetry, 'cause I was pretty danged sure that nobody was going to be paying much attention. A great deal of freedom, that... but it didn't foster the best habits of follow-through. If your project takes wing in cyberspace, but nobody notices, does it even exist? Forget about trees and forests. Projects in cyberspace can literally fail to exist, if nobody notices. If you don't have any reciprocal links, or your page ranking is in the doldrums, and your content is constantly stale, you might as well not even have a project at all.

Which is where the web gets tricky. A lot of people jumped into this line of business, over the past 10 years, thinking that all they needed to do, was put something out there, and it would suffice. Unlike a lot of people, I got into this line of work *precisely* because I knew that just putting something out there, was not going to be good enough. The deciding moment for me to jump into web work came, when I thought to myself during the 1995 Super Bowl, when the first company had their url at the bottom of their Super Bowl ad, "If someone is going to create those sites, someone is going to have to maintain them -- and that person (well, one of them, anyway) is me."

With the web, as with life, you're always moving -- either you're moving forward, or you're moving backwards. There's no in-between. If you fail to continue to move forward and contribute and grow and change, you fade away... and eventually, essentilly don't exist anymore. If your content is stale, your site hasn't been updated since 1998 (and says so at the bottom of all your pages) and your strategy for moving ahead isn't in place and active, you will not only alienate your visitors, but lose your relevance, lose your backlinks, and slowly but surely fade out of the picture.

This is even more true with blogging and RSS and podcasting. All of these media are dependent upon constant growth and change. You can't just put a podcast out there once, and walk away, thinking that's enough. You can't just create a blog and then let it sit there. You can't just throw out an RSS file and only update it once a month, and have anyone continue to bother with it. All these media depend -- demand -- constant attention, constant growth, a consistent strategy, and consistent implementation, which can't be scattershot and "hail mary".

When you're working the dynamic web, you have to keep moving. Like a shark... like all of nature. All the world is in constant motion -- either forwards or backwards -- and the web is no different.

For all its singularity and uniqueness and newness, the web is JUST like this ancient planet.