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.
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.
My Scribe SEO review
Click for more info.
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There’s some real meat to this review of Scribe SEO (and even a cool video) further down, but let me give you a bit of background as to why I’m writing this first. Why? Well, before you know what something can do, I think it’s important to answer the question of “Why bother?”
So:
What you have to understand about this review of Scribe SEO — a software service that helps users SEO optimize their copy (and which works with Wordpress through a plugin) — is that I’m the same guy who wrote a post called “Screw SEO,” after which Michael Martine stalked me with nunchucks for dispairaging his craft.
And yet, when Brian Clark asked me to demo Scribe (a Copyblogger project), I thought it might be cool to give it a try. But it gets more ridiculous: Today, you can find me on the Scribe site, giving a shining testimonial. So given the aforementioned “Screw SEO” mentality, you’re probably wondering what gives.
Allow me to explain: I guess I don’t really think SEO sucks per se. It’s more that I feel it sucks conditionally.
For me, most of the time, SEO feels pointless because I blog about nothing that anyone would ever search for. When I wrote “Christmas is Gay,” for instance, I wrote it because the idea seemed funny to me, not because I expected people to Google “gay Christmas” and find that post.
(Note to self: Google “gay Christmas” and see what comes up. I’ll bet it’s interesting.)
But I’ll admit it… there are times I should probably be optimizing. I have a really good aWeber tutorial that would probably be earning me some business if people could find it in the search engines. And I suppose I’d get a few more clients if I optimized for the phrase “Wordpress blog setup,” maybe.
When people pointed this out to me — that SEO and compelling content worked together and that a few SEO tweaks would essentially help me get more mileage out of what I had already written and done — my reply was always that the effort wasn’t worth the reward.
In other words: I was doing fine as it was, so optimizing was too big of a pain in the ass to be worth whatever increase in business I might see from it.
In order for me to give a shit about SEO, one of two things was going to have to happen: Either the reward I could expect from optimizing was going to have to get more promising, or doing the work to optimize was going to have to become so stupidly easy that I’d basically trip over it.
So, to the punchline: The reason I like Scribe is that it makes SEO stupidly easy and obvious.
(I’m pitching the above to the Scribe folks as their slogan. I haven’t heard back yet.)
When you use Scribe as part of your workflow, it happens like this:
1. You write a post naturally, the way you normally would, using your normal writing voice to talk about the topic.
2. As you write, Scribe is staring at you in the corner of the “Write Post” window. From the get-go, it’s yelling at you if you’ve forgotten something obvious.
3. Once you’re done writing, you click a button to analyze the post. Scribe then tells you which keywords you’re already naturally optimized for.
4. You can then decide to roll with the keywords that are already primarily emphasized (and Scribe will tell you how to do that), or you can decide to emphasize different keywords (and Scribe will tell you how to do that, too).
It’s right in your face, which is what I needed in order to care about SEO. It also uses intuitive visual cues — like, if you’re doing things right, you see green stuff up there in the corner. If you’re not, you’ll see red stuff. If you’re so-so, you’ll see some yellow. I know, I know… you’re wondering if I really need it to be this simple. The answer is yes. If I’m to do it, then yes… it has to be this simple. And I’ve found that a lot of people are like me in that way.
But enough explanation… let me show you a little video of Scribe in action. (NOTE: If you’re reading this in a feed or on Facebook, you’ll probably need to click through to my site to see the video.)
(You can also click the button in the lower-right corner to play it full-screen)
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Now, Scribe isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t get you millions of visits simply because you’ve used it but done nothing else, and won’t do all of your work for you because it hasn’t developed Hal-from-2001-style evil artificial intelligence capabilities (yet). There’s still some stuff you’ll need to do on your own, to allow Scribe to do its thing for you with the best results.
So here are some things to keep in mind:
Keyword choice matters.
At some point, you’ll want to figure out which keywords are worth targeting. If you write a post about whale oil lamp efficiency, Scribe will help you get laser-focused on those words and you’ll likely rank #1 for “whale oil lamp efficiency” in no time. But chances are nobody is searching for that term, so it’s kind of pointless.
Links matter.
As described in the video, this post is partially an experiment to see how well I can rank for the phrase “Scribe SEO review.” Because incoming links help a post’s ranking, I’m going to try my damnedest to get Copyblogger to link to this review. If they do, having an incoming link to this post from a high-authority, highly-relevant site like CB is going to help me place better. The more links you get coming to whatever you’re trying to optimize (ideally from relevant, popular sites, using your desired keywords in the anchor text), the better the ranking.
The other principles of SEO matter.
If the above two points aren’t things that you already fully understand or if you know little else about SEO, I’m going to very strongly suggest picking up a copy of IttyBiz.com’s SEO School. SEO School is by far the most accessible, most no-bullshit / no-technobabble guide to SEO I’ve ever seen. You get SEO School and Scribe and I think you’re off to a fantastic start.
In fact, if you care about SEO and write or work in an area where search engine visitors matter (”wedding photographers in oregon”, “IKEA cabinet repair”, “Wordpress tips and tricks”) I’d go so far as to suggest a full starter pack that will take you from knowing virtually nothing to being pretty damn near as optimized as you can be given who and where you are. Pick up the following and you’re golden.
SEO School: To teach you the basics of SEO quickly and easily in a way anyone can understand and implement.
Scribe SEO: To allow you, in a very intuitive and natural way, to implement the copywriting part of what you learn from SEO School.
Thesis: Scribe was designed to work as a compliement to Copyblogger’s most visible product — the Thesis theme for Wordpress. Thesis is widely regarded as perhaps the best out-of-the-box-SEO-friendly Wordpress theme currently in existence, and contains all of the code machinery that Scribe uses to work optimally.
(Note: Thesis is not required to use Scribe. You can also use Headway (which I also really like), and you can use any other theme if you install the All-in-One SEO plugin.)
The three-pack I’ve recommended above won’t magically make your site a magnet for whatever terms you want to target, but it will give you a hell of a lot better shot at it than if you just kind of dick around and don’t really have any idea what you’re doing.
For many niches, search engine traffic is EVERYTHING. If that’s you, and you’re either just starting out or if you haven’t been optimizing, invest a few bucks and pick this stuff up. Even all three together are hell of a lot less expensive than an SEO consultant, and you’ll likely be paid back quickly in new profits if you do things right.
Look, I’m going to be blunt here. Do I suddenly care all about SEO, and am I going to start optimizing everything I write? No, absolutely not. I still don’t give a shit 90% of the time because I don’t write often about stuff that is all that optimizable (like Christmas being gay). But sometimes I’ll do a tutuorial. Or I’ll create a service, or a product. And those will be things I really probably should at least try to optimize.
And now, with Scribe, I can do that without hassle, and absolutely will. So yeah, my definitive word is that if you’re like me, you should get it.
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I am Johnny’s bloody fist
The following is a guest post by Nathan Hangen, who I’ve gotten to know on Twitter. He writes some good shit for some of the same sites I write for, and he offered to write some good shit for me, and so I said, “Hell yeah, dude.”
I’m trying out the guest post thing on this site recently – one from Tim Brownson a while back, this one, and two more in the hopper. It’s strange for me to have folks writing on a blog that is about me more than it’s about any topic, but this is a very cool post and fits the tone here, and it’s also kind of about me, and pulls a reference from Fight Club, which I wrote about two posts ago.
He also wrote this a few weeks ago and because I’m incredibly organized, I’m not getting to it until now, so the time references that are off are my fault. Please FedEx tomatoes and I will throw them at myself.
Dig on it.
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Johnny B. Truant is a man on a mission. He’s on fire and literally kicking the shit out of life right now.
I just logged in to the Third Tribe today and there he is…front and center…taunting me with his excellence.
He’s over at Ittybiz, Copyblogger, Problogger, and a thousand other places it seems. There’s really not a spot I can turn to where he isn’t glaring at me…laughing his ass off.
Just when I was Comfortable
It’s not that I have a problem with Johnny being awesome; it’s that now that he’s stepped up his game, I have to step up mine. It’s like a game of chess…the minute you let up is the minute that a 15 year old kid comes and beats your ass.
If he’s the Verizon guy bragging about his awesome 3G network, then I’m a shabby Luke Wilson trying to pimp a shitty network, all while making really lame jokes.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…Join ‘Em
So, while I’m all about expanding the pie (thanks, Chris Guillebeau), I’m also pretty darn competitive, which comes in handy when trying to stand out in a crowded blogosphere. Because of that, I like to keep my eye on the growth of other bloggers in order to give me a little extra motivation.
The problem is that Johnny has raised his game too far, and now, my normal lazy tactics don’t work as well as they used to.
As a result, I’ve decided that it might be a better idea to learn from this guy than to compete against him.
3 Steps to Kicking the Blogosphere’s Ass
1. BE DIFFERENT.
Johnny is smart enough to know that there are dozens of already successful bloggers talking about how to blog for cash. Instead of jumping in those shark-infested waters, he decided to tweak a bit and talk mainly about what he calls “personality branding,” which apparently means finding a way to make money by being “the best YOU that you can be.” What I like about this is that not only are there relatively few people who see how the tide of marketing is changing (look at the success of the “Third Tribe” mentality), but that there are very few that take it as seriously as Johnny does.
And for kicks, he somehow also tosses in setting up Wordpress blogs, as an additional service. Like, being the funny blog setup guy, too.
He’s not forcing himself into a niche that he hates in order to make a few bucks, and he isn’t using hit and run tactics to churn customers. He actually over-delivers, which is something that any service provider can learn from.
The key here? Do something unique instead of copying everyone else.
2. NETWORK TO EXPAND YOUR CONNECTIONS.
Networks are paramount to the success of any business, and to that end, Johnny has become a master networker. The guy was a nobody just a year ago, and now he’s hanging out with all the cool kids. How’d he do it?
First, he actually put money on the line to buy IttyBiz’s $400 Online Business School course when he was starting out…something that a lot of new business owners would be afraid to do. Next, instead of simply using the course, he also got in touch with Naomi Dunford, who made the OBS course, and worked out a win/win mentor/protegee relationship…brilliant move. Lastly, he continued to develop new connections and leverage the ones he already had in order to expand his network. Guest posts and phone calls…next thing you know, he’s on top of the world.
Of course, this wouldn’t have worked as well if he wasn’t good, but to be quite honest, aggressive networking still sort of works…even if you suck. (Johnny’s note: What are you saying, Nathan? Dammit.)
3. KEEP TRYING UNTIL SOMETHING WORKS.
Some of you know that Johnny was a comedy blogger for a while, but because comedy readers prefer reading and then leaving to actually spending money, it just didn’t work out. Instead of quitting, Johnny found a way to combine his personality (humor) with another skill (consulting and tech help), and then used that combination to make money by simply being himself.
Now, he can laugh his way to the bank…just because he was willing to keep trying new things.
If you read through his archives (as I did, and as any guest poster should do), you’ll see that he mentions trying different taglines and branding options to see what resonated best with his audience. Eventually, he found a combination that worked.
Lesson learned…if you aren’t constantly trying new things, then you’ll have a hard time finding what works.
A Desperate Plea
Instead of ending this post with your typical summary paragraph and call to action, I’d like to beg Johnny to take some time off to let that bloody fist heal.
Johnny, you’re like that guy at the poker table that keeps going “all in.” It’s really hard for me to continue being lazy when you keep raising the stakes.
Besides, it’s Superbowl Sunday, and instead of drinking beer and stuffing my face…I’m writing a guest post. Where’s the love man? (Johnny’s note: I love you, man.)
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Nathan Hangen is a cool guy whose email signature proves that he’s just as all over the place as the guy who normally writes on this blog, so let’s just say that you should check out his blog and follow him on Twitter and kind of see which crazy places that takes you.
