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Just make this annoying thing go away.
Update: Aaron Wall left an epic comment here which adds significantly to the discussion. Click here to see it (it’s #55).
I remember having a conversation with Chris, sitting in Café Méliès in Montreal one time, talking about business. We had an idea for a private forum. This was a few years ago, I think– maybe even before the book.
We would base is on Aaron Wall’s private SEO community, base it on our expertise in social media etc. We’d split whatever money we made, pay any blogger who wanted to be an affiliate. The idea was simple, but good and scalable. It would make a lot of money if we did it right. So we called Brian Clark– he was doing Teaching Sells at the time. He said, “Good stuff. I’m in.”
The joke is, Chris and I never did it… at least, not in that format. :)
Much later, Third Tribe would be released– pretty much the same thing we talked about. Good on Brian for actually having the initiative. :) Aaron Wall’s forum would increase in price, from $100 to $300 per month (still a good value IMHO) and continue to grow. Chris would launch Kitchen Table Companies and other private communities of the same type.
Except I’ve been talking to Mark O’Sullivan at the exceptional Vanilla Forums, who says that big web personalities are asking him about private forums for their sites. I’ve been interviewing Brett Rogers, who funds his documentaries partially by having people come along on his adventures. And I’ve just started working with Martin Berkhan, who can’t handle the flood of questions people ask him about his workout and nutrition methods because they seem to work so well.
What is there was a solution to this? I think there is. But let’s veer off for a second.
Something big changed with the web. We could create personal brands, broadcast ourselves for free, and create a following. Except if we got popular, we started not being able to pay attention to everyone anymore. This is normal.
I’m thinking of Richard Nikoley. His (successful) experiment with not washing his hair for two years has led to articles in the Chicago Tribune and other places. He can’t handle the emails he gets anymore. Also Chris Guillebeau, who recently got 800 comments on a post he put out.
As Aaron Wall has said, popularity is an inequality between supply and demand. You solve it by raising price.
Books and conferences are price points– they are old methods that people are used to and don’t flinch at. I use both, and they work well. But there’s a problem with them.
Middlemen take over the old methods. They live as parasites off what you and I produce. Many of them do it without adding any value whatsoever.
There is something missing from Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans method. It is fine for artists, for producers of actual artifacts, artists, etc. This is one reason Seth Godin’s Domino Project is so interesting. It cuts middlemen out. But it still requires the creation of an artifact… of a product.
I believe that what people want when they read your book, when they come to see you speak, or sing, or when they buy art from you– I believe that what they actually want is you.
This method has worked for authors before. Gary Vee and Tim Ferriss basically sold 1-on-1 time with them in exchange for bulk book purchases. This has the advantage of making them look big to a mainstream audience, but the end result is the same. People often want them, not the book. Same with all the people I mentioned who do amazing things.
Your audience wants to be a part of your life. Maybe, in some cases, you should let them.
Here is another assertion which I might be a bit shocking.
The web naturally creates an ecosystem of micro-stars, like television, but doesn’t necessarily have a way to turn this into a living. If you keep answering emails, forever, you become exhausted and your personal time is sucked out of your life.
The solution is paid access.
Of course, you don’t want to monetize your strong ties. That would be insane. The social norms space stays pure. You don’t pay your wife for the nice dinner she made.
But weak ties, by definition, take more than they give. They do not, as many people say, “pay in terms of attention,” except in huge masses which become unwieldy because of a new kind of demand– bug fixes, emails, etc.
Here is my theory. Once supply and demand of personal access are no longer equal, solving it through price not only helps you maintain a solid personal life but accelerates the process of popularity, by helping you free your time and do cooler shit.
A new stream of income means more freedom, which turns into a more interesting life, which turns into more popularity, which turns into more income, etc. A virtuous circle.
Of course, most of what you do is free and public. That’s one level of access. But I think that you should turn on different levels as well. Everyone in social media right now wants books and speaking gigs. You only get those at a certain level of popularity, but you could turn lesser levels on as well. Forum access, email access, Skype access– any of these could become an income stream for various types of web personalities.
But wait!, I hear you saying. Let’s say some of these weak ties become strong ties! What do we do then? Well, easy. Stop monetizing them. We could call this the dinner party rule– if you’d invite someone to dinner, then they should have free access to you. This impacts the bottom line, but that’s natural with friendships– wanted, even. Besides, friendship is more valuable than $47 a month or whatever.
Look, this post has already gotten much longer than I thought it would. I could go on forever about this– it’s so logical to me that I could argue it until the cows come home. But I won’t.
Instead, I’ll ask you what you think, and to spread it if you think the idea is interesting or worth talking about. Tweet or subscribe below.
By the way, I don’t know if it’s something I personally want to do– although I’m pretty sure I could. Maybe you could too, once your audience reaches a certain mass. Wouldn’t that be easier than trying to get a frikkin book deal or becoming a social media expert? Besides, I suspect there’s only enough of those to go around.
Filed by Julien at 11:09 am under business, community, experiments, social media, trends
70 Comments
I hear a McDonald’s franchise costs over a million dollars to buy.
When you buy one, though, it basically starts to print money. They have the system down so well that you can plop a McDonald’s down anywhere and tell ahead of time how much money it will make. Likewise Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and all those places. A franchise is essentially a business in a box– a machine.
Other businesses, the unique ones, are machines too. As I sit here at my local coffee place by the canal, I realize suddenly that the gears beneath it are identical to the place I go to downtown. Different owners, different staff, different food– same business. It’s a formula, and that means that there’s a lot of it you can predict.
The only part you can’t predict is the human element. Can the staff upsell you their lattés, or make you show up more often? Once you’ve got it running, though, that too is mostly math. You know how much you make any day of the week under most circumstances.
If you’re a freelancer and you mostly work with clients, you may never understand this, because your business doesn’t work this way. You have low overhead because it’s basically you and your work, but it also can’t be automated. You can’t let your success work for you as much, unless you use existing infrastructure. (It’s why singers release perfumes.)
I bet if you run enough businesses, you start to see the machines inside every business. If you know real estate, you can walk into a building and see how everything is going to work 5 years from now, and tell the risk of the tenants from how they greet you.
By the way, we here online should be able to do the same thing with websites. Can you?
Filed by Julien at 11:35 am under business, clear thinking
6 Comments
Just a quick thought.
Bloggers receive commission via affiliate links if they choose to. They are influencing a sale. They are salespeople. Companies see value in that, so they gladly pay that percentage.
Newspapers influence people too, so why don’t they receive a commission? If they influence someone in selling an iPad, why shouldn’t the newspaper get paid?
You might answer that it would result in undue influence to the journalist in question. Not so.
A journalist could write what he wants as usual, and another department (advertising, etc.) could insert affiliate links after the fact. As long as we keep the divide between departments, the reporting remains pure. No problem.
Newspaper websites already receive a ton of traffic. Any newspaper that decides to do this on their website makes a extra cool million a year, easy.
Filed by Julien at 6:56 pm under business
9 Comments
I spent the last three days in New York at Tools of Change, a book conference, talking with people in the publishing industry. I did this mostly in bars, which are the places you are most likely to hear the truth, especially late at night.
Only now, back home, do I realize: On the web, we have technology change what we do all the time. But other industries are not used to being threatened by it- having their whole business models be devoured by it.
Perfect example: The Kindle 2 is out, and it reads books out to you. “Sounds great,” you may say. But the Author’s Guild of America disagrees. It calls the technology illegal, a breach of copyright law. Follow the link to understand why this is insane, in case it isn’t clear.
Now, let’s say you and I are running a company on the web, and this happens to us: Google demolishes our business model, somehow. Would we resort to lawsuits? I suspect I would just roll over and go “ok, time to do something else,” because we knew this time would come, right?
We expect it to happen because we’ve adjusted to the rate of change of the modern world. It’s expected. But technology has not always done this to business; only recently is it starting to be felt, and companies are resorting to their usual tactics. But this time the enemy can’t be fought that way, because it isn’t another company. It’s something else.
Their enemy is progress.
Think about that.
Filed by Julien at 1:03 am under business
10 Comments
Update: The part about Scoble leaving Podtech appears to be false. Sorry about the gossip dudes. My sentiments remain unchanged though.
I don’t know anything about Podtech (I don’t think anybody does), but I just read on Andrew Baron’s blog that Podtech is in sinking and Scoble may be out (the original tweet-based rumour being here). Who does this leave as the premiere audio/video content company? Podshow. Who’da thunk it.
If this is true, it means there’s going to be a lot of doubt going around the content-creation space (audio, video, etc.) in the next little while. Maybe less money, who knows.
The individual creators, on the other hand, are in a stronger position than ever. As the networks fail, the creators can continue to do their work for less money than a company ever could, getting little sponsorships along the way to keep them alive. They’re f’n cockroaches, and can thrive in the tiniest of niches with no problem.
I’ll be offline for the next fourteen hours (on a ferry in the middle of the Atlantic), so I won’t know how this will pan out, but I bet there are interesting times ahead for folks like us.
BTW, I’m calling it right now: Scoble, next evangelist for Facebook.
Filed by Julien at 9:30 am under business, podcasting
4 Comments
If you’re irritated about the way influencers seem to be jumping from one web app to another, you aren’t alone. Dave Slusher just renounced ‘the search for the newer and shinier,’ and I suspect many others will follow after Facebook becomes passé.
What Dave doesn’t realize is that it is in the nature of early influencers’ attention to be transitory. The reason they jump from one app to another is precisely because they are early influencers, and people pay attention to them precisely because they try things before anyone else.
In fact, I could even go so far as to say that, if they stop trying the new and shiny, attention to them will dwindle.
What Slusher has done (by unsubscribing) is exercise the power he does have, which is attention. If attention is what causes these web apps to become popular, it is also the thing that causes early influencers power to expand– attention is the very nature of power on the web.
So if you’re waiting for your web app to get picked up by Scoble, Arrington, or anyone else, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even if you are the new Facebook, it is in their very nature to drop the old as the new and shiny comes along.
It happens in Hollywood, it happens in electronics, and it happens on the web. One day, you and your app, your weblog, or your podcast, will be over.
Start working on your next thing NOW.
Filed by Julien at 6:52 pm under business, podcasting, strategy, trends
6 Comments
I met with a girl yesterday who basically laid out to me that my business strategy was non-existent. She’s right, of course. I don’t have business cards, my website doesn’t tell anyone what I can do for them, nothing. She was totally right, and it’s kind of embarrassing, now that I think about it. So I have to figure that all out.
In other news, I’ll be at the Podcast Expo this weekend hanging out with CC Chapman, Anji Bee, Canis Lupus, and anyone else that will have me. Thanks very much to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff for helping ensure that I don’t end up paying 100 dollars for a cab into stupid sunny Ontario, California.
Filed by Julien at 1:02 pm under business, podcasting
1 Comment
I had a chit chat with Mark and Bob during the ride down to PodCamp where we talked all about social networking and why influencing the text-based web matters a great deal. Take a listen if you want to learn a thing or two about how to promote yourself as a podcaster on the web.
Filed by Julien at 12:36 am under business, podcasting, random
6 Comments
I just finished listening to episode two of HarperCollins’ new Prosecast. It’s a great example of what companies can be doing to enhance the experience they provide – and even better, it’s produced by someone in Canadian podcasting, not by some random idiots with no experience in the industry.
I hope I see more stuff like this soon; it’s showing how existing companies are beginning to recognize the value of the experience that podcasters bring to the table.
Filed by Julien at 4:16 pm under business, podcasting
4 Comments
For the first time today, I am left upset by a blog that does not accept comments. Yes, it was his, though the decision didn’t bother me at the time.
When marketers look at success in a product or service, I wonder if they tell themselves “This restaurant has clearly succeeded because…” while finding reasons that justify the beliefs they already have. I have asked myself this repeatedly while reading Permission Marketing.
But would this not apply to everything? Sometimes I say to myself, “Well, I’ve made it onto Sirius! Clearly, that’s because I stood by what I wanted to do, and didn’t compromise the kind of show I wanted to make!” If I had failed in creating a popular podcast, however, would I not conclude that I failed because I refuse to compromise? After all, all great entertainers need to bend to corporate interests sooner or later! Do we not all justify our current positions with reasoning that coincides with our worldview? He didn’t compromise, why wasn’t he gifted with success during his lifetime?
With the release of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick is more than ever before being seen as a genius, both misunderstood and ahead of his time. If you believe this, ask yourself: What does this say about my worldview? If he refused to compromise, why didn’t he succeed during his lifetime?
Back to Seth. He says:
Jindi’s refusal to compromise [her menu] is yet another reason she’s doing so well at lunch, actually. Because taste is starting to catch up with her. People are now ordering the items she would have deleted ten years ago.
And in a connected world, it’s much easier for the chowhounds to leave a digital trail of breadcrumbs to her door.
Ingrained in this statement are the following beliefs:
2 – Refusing to compromise your ideals will eventually bring you success.
While I am far from qualified to question Seth’s reasoning, the post itself does not fully explain the reasoning upon which these conclusions are based. Simply believing Seth’s post because he is Seth or because he is an A-list blogger or whatever could lead a number of well-meaning people astray.
My personal experience is limited, but I believe a certain amount of compromise is required for any venture’s success. But of course, you can probably see that by examining what I write already. :)
Filed by Julien at 11:50 pm under business, podcasting
8 Comments
