You don’t want to make money online
This is a guest post by Drew Kime of Cook Like Your Grandmother. It’s probably time I had a post from Drew because not only does he constantly snipe dry wit at me, but I also keep mentioning him various places as an example of someone who isn’t simply selling into the self-perpetuating internet marketing arena. I’ll be like, “Well, what if you wanted to be an affiliate for… um… not internet marketing information but… um… I don’t know… cookware?” And then I’ll remember that I actually know a guy who that would work for, which reduces the amount that I look like a bullshiter. Slightly.
Anyway, enjoy this post. It’s a good one.
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The third-grade teacher asks the class, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” She gets the standard answers: cowboy, princess, firefighter, doctor. But Billy says, “I want to be rich.” Everyone laughs, then the teacher asks, “But what do you want to do?” Billy answers, “I want to make lots of money.”
Fast-forward about twenty years. Who from that class do you think has the highest net worth?
Gut check
Right now, you’re either thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like me,” or “Sure he’s rich, but I’ll bet he’s a shallow, self-important prick.” But aren’t you reading online marketing blogs because you want to be rich now? Why is it wrong for a 9-year-old to want to be rich, but okay for an adult? When did money as a primary goal become acceptable?
Those aren’t abstract philosophical questions. You really need to answer them for yourself to understand what you’re willing to do. Because unless you really, deep down, believe in putting the money first, you must be putting something else first.
Do you know what that “something else” is?
Online marketing … of what?
Look at all the courses that teach you how to do AdWords campaigns. How to identify niche markets and exploit them. How to optimize your landing pages to convert the long-tail keywords. PPC arbitrage … Affiliate marketing … ClickBank … Yeah, I speak marketing. I also know what all that stuff means and how to do it. But I don’t want to. It’s soul-crushing boredom.
I might discover there’s an untapped market for wombat grooming. Do some research and write an ebook. Start an AdWords campaign and start selling like crazy. Woo-hoo! But I really don’t give a shit about wombats, no matter how many rich people there are looking for a book on cleaning them.
If I want to spend all day doing work that I don’t care about, I’ll just stick with a job. You know, let someone else figure out the business plan, do what I’m told for eight to nine hours a day, and do what I want nights and weekends.
Money makes anything interesting, right?
Lots of jobs pay well not because they’re hard, but because they’re distasteful. Ask Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy. Or check this list of 10 High Paying Dirty Jobs. Number 1 on the list? Crime scene cleaner: “With a little experience under your belt and flexibility with your work hours, you can easily make about $75,000 a year with this job.”
So there are jobs out there that you could apply for today and start making a decent living. But you won’t apply for them, because you aren’t interested in the work. So why do you think pay-per-click arbitrage is going to do it for you? The money? Look at that list of dirty jobs again. Still think it’s all about the money?
Self-employed, but still just a job
The mythical salesman who can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, do you think that’s because he likes ice cubes? Or is it because he likes closing the sale? It’s the rush and the money. And if you’re doing it online instead of face-to-face, you don’t even get the rush.
What you get is research, analysis, number crunching and, if you do it all really really well: money. Are you okay with that, or does that sound like a “job”?
Follow most online marketing advice and you know to follow the data. It’s easier to find the desire than to create the desire, so it’s more profitable to sell to an under-served market than to create a whole new market. It’s not about what you want to sell, it’s about what they want to buy. To make big money online, you can’t focus on what interests you.
That’s the forumula for success I keep seeing. Ignore my own interests. Sell what other people want. Build the sites other people want. Discuss the products other people want. Study hard, work harder, and after about a year you, too could make $111.
Screw that
If you have interests other than money, there are plenty of free resources to show you how to effectively sell what you’ve got. And you’ll care about it because you’re learning how to more effectively talk about what interests you.
Unless … well … are you the exception? Are you the one who, back at the start of this article, thought, “Yeah, I was just like little Billy”? Then you probably could sell the wombat grooming book, and smile all the way to the bank. If that’s you, I’ve got a couple of cook books that could use some good affiliates.
Drew Kime teaches people how to cook like Grandma at How To Cook Like Your Grandmother. He has published the book of the same name, and Starting From Scratch: The Owner’s Manual for Your Kitchen.
No, Charlie Gilkey isn’t a 90-year-old bricklayer named Blanche
I’ve entered this weird and sublimely freaky area where I’ve realized that I spend 95% of the time that I’m not spending with my wife and kids with you people.
I guess this is what happens when you work online, and work in it in as skewed of a way as I do — where the borders between personal and professional are as thin as the premise that Justin Timberlake has sex appeal. I had this friend — let’s call him Mike — who met this girl on the internet back in 1993. We all thought, “Oh, she’ll be a total weirdo. And meeting someone online is both strange and creepy.”
But we were wrong. She was more “disturbing” than a weirdo, and in the place of “creepy,” we sort of described her and the situation affectionately as “sad.”
But times have changed. As the internet grew up — from being countless phone lines running to countless 2400 baud modems in the basements of the mothers of countless oily losers to being the porno superhighway we know today — it became possible to actually “meet” people online who couldn’t recite the entire Star Wars script by memory. You know, people who aren’t totally socially retarded.
So I need to find my buddy Mike and apologize, and to let him know that if he had met this girl today, I wouldn’t mock him because… because you actually can form relationships online. I’ll admit it.
And maybe that’s just me justifying myself, because I’ll repeat: 95% of my non-wife and non-kids social interaction. So very odd.
In just a few days, I’m going to get on a plane and fly to Austin, Texas to meet some of the people I hang around with all day. (I’m particularly interested and excited to meet all of the folks I know from the Third Tribe, which just so happens to be the coolest and most attractive bunch of people alive today.)
Now, there’s technically a conference going on in Austin at that time, but I’m not going to get an event pass. The pagan lesbian transsexual couple I’ve never met that I’ll be staying with convinced me that there was no point. (And to think people say that the internet is nothing but freaks.)
Through all of this, my friend and client Jess (a chainsaw-weilding pervert energy consultant I’ve never met) keeps telling me that I have to AT LEAST get business cards, and to upgrade my dumbphone to a smartphone, because if I go to SXSW to meet the rest of the people who neither of us have met, I at least have to be somewhat professional and hip. I considered splurging $10 at VistaPrint for a stack of glossy cards that said only THIS IS JOHNNY’S BUSINESS CARD on the front and THIS IS THE BACK on the back but got inspired and sprung for something far more insulting and irreverent, but haven’t yet made up my mind on the phone with only about 72 hours left to decide.
It’s strange to me to think that I hang out with these people (with you people) all day every day, and yet I don’t know any of you.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it? I do know you.
People who don’t live in this space the way we do still think that internet friends are an impossibility, that the only people you can meet online are 400 lb. pedophiles named Jasper, who are masquerading as 14 year old girls. While that’s true on MySpace (and here I’m supposed to say hi to SexyJasper221, this friendly girl scout I know online who apparently has candy in the back of her windowless white van*), it’s not true on the Net at large. And here’s why:
Nobody is that good of an actor. Not as many people are fucked-up weirdos as the world would have you think — and I’ll stand by that.
After exchanging countless emails and tweets with Anne Sorensen (who will get all bubbly at this mention), I’m 100% convinced that she’s not actually a male prison inmate doing time in Tennessee.
I’ll wager dollars to donuts that Michael Martine isn’t actually a college kid operating out of his dorm room.
I think I have a pretty good bead on Naomi Dunford, and although I’m told that I’ll immediately remark that she should have shorter hair and swear more, I’m pretty sure she’s not actually an 1880s riverboat gambler.
This is Web 2.0. A lot of the people we interact with, we see them and hear them as they really are. And when we don’t actually see or hear them, we see photos. And even if we don’t trust the photos (they could all be lies, of course), we get little snippets of off-the-cuff, unrehearsed interaction that by themselves mean nothing, but which all together paint a surprisingly vivid picture.
Could Sean Oliver be someone other than who he say he is? Well, I suppose the internet enhances his or anyone’s ability to create a false face — it allows you to be a different age, sex, race, height, weight, national origin or whatever than what you actually are — but I’m going to bet that even if he’s a Hasidic Jew midget FBI agent named Beatrice, I still have his personality nailed.
The saying goes, You can’t hide what’s inside. (I think a candy bar or something stole that as a slogan once upon a time, much like the co-opting of the popular expressions “Once you pop, you can’t stop” and “Where’s the beef?”)
I think that if you’re some creep trolling for action on a creep forum or if you’re an FBI agent trying to catch creeps trolling for action on a creep forum, you can create a persona and be that persona for a while. But let me see either of those people interacting daily on Twitter. Let me see their blogs, or their guest posts on other blogs, or their comments on blogs across the blogosphere. Let me see how they answer wall posts on Facebook or respond to off-the-cuff Skype chats or emails.
I think the people who are falsifying their personalities have to hide in the more faceless, more contrived, less “live” forms of online interaction. And I think that if you have been putting people on, your true nature is going to come out… because there’s no way it can’t. We are who we are.
(And don’t go saying that we know James is a woman because she admitted it. I know plenty of folks who said they could tell ahead of time. Because in this arena, you can’t hide who you really are for long, and how you really are inclined to behave and be and interact. You reveal little bits of yourself with every exchange, and eventually, people were kind of like, You can’t hide what’s inside. And hey, while we’re on the topic, where’s the beef?)
So these people I haven’t met, who I’m excited to meet this weekend? Well, I already know them.
My dad would shit bricks if I told him that I was staying with Pace and Kyeli, but I didn’t think twice about it.
I don’t expect to be surprised at all in my interactions with Charlie or Dave or Sonia or anyone else. Because I know these people already.
And back to my dad and his brick-shitting? All of the membership money for the Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions goes into Charlie’s account, and he pays me my share. I’ll do something similar for my new, as-of-yet-unnamed course (tentative release date: March 23!) with Lee Stranahan. People think, “That’s idiotic. They could be criminals. They could rip you off.”
But… I know Charlie. I know Lee. Could they rip me off? Sure they could, but so could anybody I see every day in my day-to-day life. Does being able to see the face of a person make them more trustworthy? Hardly.
This world is getting smaller. It’s weird: Jonathan Fields, Pam Slim, Darren Rowse… I can’t walk through a bookstore anymore without seeing half a dozen books from people I talk to every day.
So I got my business cards. I’m going to spend a few days hanging out and breaking bread with these people who I know really well and who I’ve never met before. Because when you know people, and you like them, shouldn’t you meet them eventually? Yeah, that makes sense.
Besides, I owe Chris Brogan one for stealing my gimmick.
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* “Windowless white van” joke stolen from Jordan Cooper so that I can get insulted by him already.
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Want to be rich and happy, and maybe change the world?
… then you should listen to this half-hour call I did with Tim Brownson, life coach extraordinaire and guy who is unable to start the recording on his own conference call service.
Tim and his co-author John Strelecky wrote a book called How to be Rich and Happy and decided on an ambitious goal and an unusual way of reaching it: They decided that they wanted to get a million copies of the book into people’s hands, and would do so by reverse tithing almost all of the money that came from sales of the book back into producing new copies.
In this interview, we talk about values, philanthropy, why Tim and John decided on an admittedly sensationalistic title, and how to get what you really want — but suspiciously little about dolphins and/or ratatouille:
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So how can you help? Well, you can listen to the audio. You can spread the word on your blog, in your newsletter, and on Twitter. And lastly, you can and should buy the book. Remember, nobody is making money on this, if that makes a difference — not me, not Tim, and not John. We just want to make a difference, because it’s a good cause.
How to actually build a barn, or a business, or whatever
I’ve realized something.
Even though I pitch the whole “unmarketing” thing — wherein I blog about stuff that has nothing to do with anything I sell, and tell clients that I don’t care if they work with me — the truth is that there is a core of marketing beneath everything I do. Anyone who wants to follow my school of thought will need to learn how to do this balancing act.
On one hand, you’ll need to ignore a lot of marketing convention, and you’ll need to get used to underhyping rather than overhyping. You’ll learn to break rules. You’ll emphasize flaws and you’ll admit ugly truths.
But on the other hand, the truth is that you have good stuff and good services, and you want to make sure people know about them. So, while people are busy admiring your unmarketing, you really want them to keep the fact that you’re a solid and reputable person in the back of their heads, and you want them thinking that they should maybe buy from you eventually.
So, you need to do enough marketing to let them know about your cool stuff, but you need to do it without looking like a douchebag.
For me as a consultant and as a creator of almost-consulting (you’re a member of the Jam Sessions, aren’t you? If not, what’s wrong with you?) my best business credential is my own experience: Within nine months of making my first cent online, I was making five figures monthly in this little endeavor of mine. Accordingly, I’m sure to put that factoid up on my sales pages, as a bit of proof in the pudding.
But the problem is that if you dangle that kind of nugget out there, it unsurprisingly draws people who want to have five-figure monthly businesses… like, immediately.
But I tell them, “Dude… you have to put an asterisk next to my name: ‘Results not typical.’ I’m going to tell you right here and right now that I cannot and will not promise that you’ll be able to do that if you work with me, or if you buy anything I have to sell.”
So we get this tug of war. I did well, and I know I can show other people how to do well. I can help, and my clients’ testimonials seem to agree with me on that. But there are no guarantees, and especially no guarantees of doing it as fast as I did.
So this is my fundamental issue. Everyone in online marketing is selling solutions. Everyone is selling answers, selling ways to make your first and second millions. Many of those people promise that if you’ll follow these steps, 1-2-3, you’re guaranteed to make some huge amount of dollars in no time and retire to the Bahamas.
The question that I have for myself is this: How can I give my best advice, in a way that is as easy to replicate and follow as possible, without being one of those assholes who make hollow promises? People expect and deserve the best I have to offer. Is there anything I can teach that is a sure thing, or as close to a sure thing as possible?
Because, see, I’m not against money-making “systems” per se. What I’m against is false hope. If I could give you 1-2-3 that would always work, I’d happily sell it and hype the shit out of it and promise money-back guarantees and tell you to spend your mortgage payment on it because without question, you’d make it back pronto.
I just don’t think that’s how it works.
But fortunately, I realized there’s another way.
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Maybe there is a system. But maybe it’s not really a “system,” at least in the way we normally think of “systems,” if you know what I mean. Does that make sense? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
When Lee Stranahan and I started talking about doing a project together (that story is in this pretty awesome post), one of the things that probably annoyed the piss out of Lee is that I was immediately dead-set against overpromising anything, and killed several ideas before they had a chance to even be born.
I didn’t want a blueprint.
I didn’t want a plan with a timeline, the end of which culminated in leaving a day job or making a certain amount of money or moving to Hawaii with five naked supermodels.
I didn’t want a guarantee. Or at least, I didn’t want a traditional guarantee based on results achieved, given that we all know that results in life are never guaranteed.
But then I realized that I was looking at it the wrong way… which brings me to a metaphor, because I like metaphors. Especially convoluted ones that are barely apt and just confuse the fuck out of people.
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My stupid metaphor — or at least an entertaining story.
I have a barn in my backyard. It’s pretty damn big, and holds my wife’s horses and the tractor that I enjoy stalling out (often) and setting fire to (once). I built that barn. Or rather, my father-in-law Frank and I built it, with a few days of help from my brother-in-law Dale, my wife Robin, and my friend Scott. But mostly, it was just me and Frank. 95% of the boards, beams, nails, screws, wires, siding, and shingles are there because one of us put them there with our own two hands.
Now, I don’t know how to build a barn. When I started, I barely knew how to use a framing hammer, which is a huge motherfucker that you swing like a broadsword. You have to drive these pole barn nails that are as big around as nightcrawlers, and believe me, there is an art to it.
I didn’t know how to install asphalt shingles on the roof. You have to put them down with a certain amount of overlap and staggered a certain amount off of the row below. You work from the bottom and you have to know to put the nails not just anywhere, but in the tar strip.
I didn’t know how to wire the lights. And if pressed, I wouldn’t probably have realized that you need a circuit breaker out there, and I wouldn’t have known how to wire it if I had known.
Now: Frank was in fact telling me exactly what to do and what to put where so that at the end, we ended up with a barn instead of a humidor. But let’s pretend he hadn’t told me exactly what to put where. Let’s pretend that he’d taught me only the skills: How to set the poles. How to do the framing. How to do the wiring. How to raise the roof trusses, and how to tack down the shingles.
Wouldn’t you agree that I have a better chance of figuring out how to build a barn if I know the skills required to do it than if I started cold? Maybe I could have stumbled through it. Or maybe I could have read a bunch of books or hired an architect or gotten the building inspector to come out more often than necessary to give me tips (or reprimands)… but I could do it, eventually.
And wouldn’t you agree that if I knew these skills well enough — and was persistent enough, and took enough action — that I could create any number of pole buildings in time, to suit whatever need I may have? Maybe a small shed. Maybe a bigger barn with a huge loft. Maybe a detached garage.
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Forget teaching results
I’ve decided that building a business is a creative endeavor. I don’t agree that you can map out a blueprint for a business, because so much depends on the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, habits, needs, and desires of the owner.
The business that would work perfectly for me may not work at all for you, so I can’t teach you the exact layout of my business for you to replicate. What I can do is to teach you the skills I used — the metaphorical hammering, shingling, wiring, and so on — and let you build your own unique business. Same skills, applied to your best purpose.
What has always bothered me is that if I told people stepwise where each nail and screw for their business should go, it wouldn’t work because they’re different than I am. And what’s worse is that even if it did work, what they’d build might not be the business they want.
Going back to the barn metaphor, I might give them a 2-stall design, but they’d own four horses. Or I’d instruct them on building a barn, and they’d say, “This is great, but I want to store cars in it, not horses. It should really have a concrete floor.”
So when Lee and I started mapping out our new course (tentatively planned for a March 23rd launch, because that’s my birthday), we decided that instead of trying to give you a blueprint, we’d instead teach you our best tools, and show you how we and others used those tools with great success. We’d show you the means we used to form beneficial partnerships, to make a movie, to write regularly for Copyblogger and Problogger or the Huffington Post, to accumulate 70 active job leads at a time and to create that five-figure monthly income, to interview Kevin Smith at his house or have Neil Gaiman retweet us on Twitter.
We decided not to give you the outline for our ideal lives, but to teach you how to determine what that ideal life truly is for you. And then, rather than teaching you how to do every detail of every task you’ll ever need, we figured it made more sense to show you how to find the best people to help you with those tasks. We figured that while you may not have the connections we have now, you almost certainly have the kinds of connections we had a few years ago — even though you probably don’t realize it.
I can’t and won’t give you instructions on how to build a whole barn, and expect that barn to fit your unique needs perfectly. And I don’t expect you to be able to build it all by yourself, from A to Z, the first time through, without making mistakes.
But I know I can teach you how to swing a hammer. To do the wiring and put up the shingles. I can show you how to enlist the help of someone like Frank to fill the gaps in your knowledge, and how to make sure that you’re building that barn to your own best specifications — even if it takes a long time, and even if your first few barns fall over.
That I can promise, with a clear conscience. That I can do.
We’re not really about giving you what you want. We’re more about giving you the tools you need to go out and get it for yourself.
“Teach a man to fish,” and all of that.
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When we launch this thing, you’ll also have a shot at an advance discount.
