A Rant on Marketing
Unless you are just making your blog to amuse yourself and friends with or otherwise for fun, the point is to market with it and make money. Right?
OK, other exceptions are like this blog right now where the purpose is to disseminate information, but even this will go to a more commercial stance soon. (Don’t worry, I mean I will add advertising to the sidebar and other tasteful ways for you to show me support for giving you great content… unlike this entry.)
Anyway, this is a rant, so expect it to dance around like it just did. I have a bad attitude and I am angry.
What made me angry? Specifically, Internet Marketers. No, I do not necessarily mean you or me, I mean the Marketers that keep trying to sell you and me information and tools so we can do our jobs better.
These characters are something else. It isn’t that they are trying to make money off teaching you what they know. In essence, that is what I am doing here, right? No, what irks me is that they all are not only pushing the same things but not establishing a value, just a price. What I mean is, instead of teaching something, much as I am trying to do here, they are just showing you PayPal and Google statements.
First off, does it really matter to YOU how much money I make? Does it? If so, get off my site, you shallow person! Since you are still here, we can assume you could care less if I am making 50 cents a day or 50 million cents a day. What does matter is if you think something I say or offer can be a help to YOU. Doesn’t matter what I do to make money, if you aren’t capable or willing to do what I do, it won’t help you any. For example, part of what I do to make money is write code. Would not do you any good at all to know how I do that if you have no knowledge or aptitude for coding. (Minor sidebar, I do not recommend that business model unless you have the coder sickness already.)
Next, as these *marketers* work, they inundate mailboxes with their “newsletters” hyping the next big product they are offering. Ever been on these lists? Ever see 20 emails a day from 20 places all selling the same exact product? I would say how spam like it was if it wasn’t opt in… I did ask for these mails. You know what they are showing me? They are showing me they will teach me to be just like them and to have the same products and the same newsletter tactics and just build hype and usually breed FearUncertaintyDoubt. Are these guys NUTS? Listen, I want to help you learn how to make money from your chair, but I sure do not want to have you setting things up exactly like I do and fishing the exact same places and selling the same product as me. I want you to learn how to make this web thing work for YOU. This is how it will grow and survive, by us each bringing our selves to it.
If you just rip me off, you are really stealing from yourself. Let’s use the coder example from above and let’s say that you are a coder. You find one of my scripts that I sell and you reverse engineer it and make your own version. Totally legal, totally ethical. But here is the rub for you: you are trying to cut into my marketplace. I am established. You are also limited by just how many people can actually use this widget. It may be a big number, but it is still finite. And, we are competitors. I am not really likely to trade links from my code site to yours. I could go on, but this is a sub-rant. 
Alternatively, let’s say you look at how I market my widget and you see a similar widget you could make or even something totally unrelated other than it being code… if you use what you learn from me to promote your product, I am VERY likely to work with you and we can both expand our markets. If we do mailing lists, OUR subject lines will NOT be for the same product.
The other part (getting back to the main rant) that really bugs the beegeebies out of me is that most of these guys are selling some really silly stuff. Sorry, you could pay me $5000 for me to give you three days of personal training and the only thing you can possibly get out of it is enthusiasm or a cookie cutter method. You cannot learn anything from me in three days that will earn you money in the long term. In six months, when you and I and however many others paid to learn this all have saturated the market, or worse, cause Google to inflict penalties to kill our revenue, we will all be back to square one.
What pushed me into rant mode was I am a member of a “community” of marketers. I pay a monthly subscription to learn from these people. Some of what they have tried to teach me is borderline illegal (and the laws will be changing to push them into the criminal side, soon) or methods that have already received something THEY are calling a slap from Google. All they have tried to “teach” me is either short term, questionable or stuff I know. OK, I do know a lot of stuff, so I sure don’t hold that against them… but was this something that made me feel good about a monthly fee? Not even close.
What the heck am I trying to get at here? Don’t try and be crafty, learn your craft! Think about the future, not just payday! There are NO easy fixes. There is not one piece of information I could impart on you that would make you rich. Even if I showed you EXACTLY how I made all my money you would not get the same results as I do unless you modified it to suit you and changed it to grow, rather than just mimic me.
I can show you some neat math real quick to give you an idea of why long term thinking is important rather than paycheck hunting.
Let’s say you buy a domain for a lot of money and spend US$15 on it. Let’s say you spend a couple hours on it and install some free script such as WordPress and you put some simple advertising on it and you spend a few hours a week on it. How much money does it need to make to be profitable? Depends on the time you spend and what that time is worth. But let’s say you are a good student and you have learned how to make a site like this in a few minutes and be able to get it up and running with link trades and such within 40 hours. Let’s be greedy and say your time is worth $50 an hour to do a job that you did in your spare time at home. By these terms, it “cost” you less then US$2100 for time, domain and hosting. Let’s also say you aren’t all that great at it, and don’t really deserve $50 an hour because you only return US$100 each month from advertising on the site… Aww! You had a loss of about US$700 that first year. Bummer. Right?
Wrong! Next year you still get the $1200 from advertising unless you screw up. Your cost drops to just hosting and domain registration, too. Which is about $120 a year if you pay a LOT for a single site. Also, the 40 hours you spent really just cut into your web surfing or Reality TV watching time… it gets to be more and more money, doesn’t it? What about year three?
But, but, but! That’s just US$100 a month!
Do it again.
Now it is $200 a month.
What? We made all these blogs on this domain for fun and information? I like talking with you, but don’t doubt for a second I am in this for the money!
This site does not cost $120 a year to keep running, it really costs less than $20 a year. If I suck, it will *only* return $1200 this year. That isn’t a bad return on investment, is it?
Yeah, I cheated with some of the numbers… it’s a rant, not a thesis. If you are paying attention and not nit picking, you will realize the premise is still sound though. If you have a clue, you just realized that what I just pointed out was a simple truth. Buy low, sell high, right?
Keep your investment low and your return high and work in a way that won’t get you slapped and the measly $1200 a year adds up. Heaven forbid you hit a home run and build a site that makes REAL money! My partner still makes money off the first site she ever built almost 10 years ago. Don’t you wish you got paid for work that you did so long ago?
It’s a rant, it’s legible, I am hitting publish now
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