Archive for April, 2009
Success comes from hard work and commitment
Posted by: | CommentsI dip into Jeremy Schoemaker’s shoemoney.com blog from time to time on my Google Reader. I like Jeremy because he’s pretty upfront, and whether you agree with him or not he puts his case forcefully and sucinctly.
A couple of his posts caught my attention today as they riff on the same theme – success online, like success in anything, comes from hard work and commitment.
In “How To Become A Successful Make Money Online Blogger” he makes the point:
Out of those who do launch their own product many don’t want to put in the work to make it through the dip.
And in “What You Got”, he gives Yaro a plug and notes:
Why in the hell would I want to invest in a idea that the founder doesn’t even believe in himself to try it… ???
I started AND failed at trying many ideas while working 9-5. I was fired from 2 jobs most people would kill to have because I worked on my own stuff all the time… These are people we are looking for.
Ideas, programmers, and marketers are A DIME A DOZEN. People who are willing to put in hard work to get through the dip are in VERY short supply.
When we first sold our largest membership website a couple of years ago, and as a result caught a bit of press, we started to receive approaches from a big bunch of people. Many were the types Jeremy talks of, someone with an idea and nothing else. The more forward ones would ask us for investment, but the majority would cadge a meeting with us, and we’d waste an hour talking in circles because they didn’t have the guts to ask for the dosh. After a while we became more adept at asking the right questions early in the encounter – typically “so what exactly is the sticking point for you; what are the resources you need to make this happen?’
Astoundingly, those who did ask us for money hadn’t done the work required. By which I mean, worked the numbers from our point of view – the ROI for the investor. They hadn’t grasped the fundamental point that our investment wasn’t to make THEM rich. It was to make us RICHER. Why else did they think we were going to put a bunch of money into their non-existant-other-than-on-paper concept? And by the way, no, we’re not interested in 3%. We want 50% minimum, a board seat and constant input. We’re not passive investors, we invest time and money, and that means we work hard when involved with a company.
Which leads me onto one of the questions that most irritates us and we would think anyone else who has made their wealth through their own efforts, ingenuity and capacity to survive, is – how do I make my millions without working hard?
We believe the hard yards are part of the journey, they are part of your learning how to do things better, how to create better systems, smoother business processes, better experiences for your customer.
You must be willing and wanting to work hard, and you must be willing to jump in. You could be the greatest, most strategic thinker on the planet at this moment in time, but all that thinking cannot replace the doing involved in starting and growing your business.
Keeping your subscription website content short and snappy
Posted by: | CommentsI was chatting to someone the other day who comes from a tradtional media background, talking about the differences between writing for a newspaper and online. We’ve written about this in Niche Content Millionaire, explaining how when you present information online you really need to make your copy snappy.
That means use as few words as possible to get your message across. Be clear, distinct, follow the style you have researched that your audience responds best to and keep your sentences short. Though we suspect you can overdo this, your goal needs to be delivering your snippets of information in thought-sized pieces. Not all niche content sites are going to be about news. For example, you may decide on a specific type of jobs listing site (www.greataupair.com is an excellent example) but the words and images you use on your site need to quickly convey your message.
The Great Au Pair website is a good example of talking directly to two audiences at once – equally they are targeting both au pairs and families wanting an au pair, to list on the site. In order to go further than a basic profile and to contact the family or au pair that appeals to you, you will need to pay a time specific fee – for example $180 will buy you three months of full access to the site. Notice the language on the site is about the quality of the candidates and there’s a reassuring tone to the words used.
Great Au Pair is at pains to make families feel that this is the only place in the world where you can find a credible, reliable au pair or nanny. We have used this site for several years to find extra help for our family and it really does work, but much of its value is in the way it talks to its audience and the tools it gives you to find that perfect au pair. At no point will you find on this website any confusing or ambiguous information. They are talking to a global audience and all of the language they use is clear, concise and reassuring.
To a degree it is true that we are all busier than ever and this is sometimes touted as the reason to write in short snaps when you are talking to an audience. But there’s more to it than this – if you write in thought-sized sentences then your copy will be noticed and understood by your readers more quickly. Whatever you do to confuse them or to put obstacles in the way of them understanding your message could be considered poor manners. If people’s time really is at a premium then if you’re going to make your millions from an online information business, you really need to make sure every sentence on your site is an information gem. This is much easier than you may think. It means that you need to write as you think, or as Fiona who was trained for the radio says – ‘write the sentences that you are thinking’. Most content writers and reporters will do this already because that’s how they’re trained to communicate, but if you’re doing the initial copy on your information website yourself, you will need to be able to write snappy, compelling content in a tone and style that speaks directly to your target niche.
Some of the most compelling texts in history are short and succinct. This is a widely quoted example:
The Lord’s Prayer runs to 56 words
God’s Ten Commandments are 297 words
The Gettysburg Address is 300 words
The European Union Directive on export of duck eggs runs to 26,911 words!
If you want to be relevant and really matter to your audience, then keep it short, interesting and snappy!
Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users
Posted by: | CommentsMaki over on the Dosh Dosh blog has a great article on the uselessness of bulk following thousands of people on Twitter. She quite rightly points out that having large numbers of followers means squat.
The only problem is that these are low-value followers. Not because they are dumb or socially inferior but because a good amount of these followers are not ultra-targeted, active or responsive. Many of them are self-promoters, spammers or automated feed accounts. These people aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. They didn’t REALLY opt-in. They even followed you automatically, didn’t they?
Maki talks about the idea of a ‘cultivated’ list where you follow people who offer you value – whether commercial or personal.
I’ve dropped a comment in saying:
You’re spot on with this article. When I started using Twitter I madly followed everyone in sight. And a bunch followed back, mostly because of automatic follow tools. I quickly realised that a large number of the people I followed were just low rent marketers who only ever twitter get rich quick scheme links.
So in recent times I’ve started to aggressively unfollow these people. They contribute nothing to the community.
I do use Twitter with a commercial imperative, I have an eBook we’re about to launch, and obviously Twitter provides a valuable way of reaching an audience. However, it’s not the only marketing strategy, and we view Twitter as a long term activity, building up a profile around my area of expertise and interest.
Now I actively chase down people who I think make a contribution in my particular area (subscription content), if they follow back, then great, but that’s not my overriding objective.
I’ve been having a bit of fun with this in recent weeks. As part of my research into some of the lower forms of internet marketing I set up a couple of autoblogs – blogs that just grab content from other sources, and display related Google Ads. One of those ’secret’ ways of making money online propagated by some internet marketing merchants. Of course, the income is miniscule, a dollar a day if you are lucky.
As part of the exercise I hooked up Twitter accounts, and using services like Twollow, it automatically follows people based on the key words I’ve selected for my autoblogs. Lo and behold, a bunch follow back. One of my autoblogs has picked up a couple of hundred followers in the last week. The complete joke is that many of them are autoblogs themseleves. It’s robots following robots. Completely worthless.
Keep up the good work.
People want the information they need, when they want
Posted by: | CommentsMark Potts, who writes the excellent Recovering Journalist blog, has a story “It’s Not the News. It’s the Packaging” that really rang my bell, he’s trying to cut through so much of the simplistic discussion about newspapers charging for content online, by making the point that:
Maybe—maybe—the thing you can charge for is the package the news comes in, not the specific news items themselves.
I dropped a comment onto his blog saying:
This whole issue of context and packaging is a theme I’ve started to push with a number of people. We used to run a large subscription only niche content site network. A large portion of our content was not unique, it was readily available through other sources. People paid our subscription fees for:
Context – we placed individual items into an overall picture.
Convenience – we delivered in the format they wanted, when they wanted
Personalisation – we let them filter to suit their needs.
It led to very loyal subscribers (now heading towards 9+ years) and consequently a successful business.
Mark struck a chord with me because these are themes that we’ve looked at in detail in our Niche Content Millionaire book (yeah yeah, it’s coming, surprising how long editing takes).
Offline content publishers around the world have embraced the idea that their print publication content has value online, and someone will buy it. It’s a naive notion, and a trap that many traditional offline publishers fell into in the early years of the new century. They were eyeing off what seemed like the successes of some of their brethren, gorillas like the Financial Times of London and the Wall Street Journal, both of whom introduced subscription versions of their paper publications. Yet in context of their overall readership and revenues, these behemoths of the media made very little money online. Only a tiny fraction of their readership were sufficiently attracted to the online editions to pay the annual subscription fees.
These publishers thought they could simply shove their existing print content onto the Internet and sell access to those millions of words just as if it was a news stand on a corner of Times Square. They were wrong, and many have now dropped the online subscription model.
None of these publishers stopped to think about how human beings work. A printed newspaper is a particular form of content. It’s organized into sections, it has shape and form and editorial direction. It’s designed to be consumed in a certain way, and to fulfill a particular purpose. Human beings intrinsically want their world to be organized. If we had an infinite amount of time in our days, then fine, we could sort through, analyze and filter the information around us, shape it for a particular purpose. Instead we have 24 hours in a day, and, it seems, ever increasingly complex lives.
Here are the truths we have established after ten years in the online content business:
• There’s too much information in the world
• No one source of information can provide all the information
Seems obvious when you think about it. Here’s the next set of truths that follow on:
• People do not have much time to source information
• People are individuals
Faced with these truths, our conclusion has remained constant for many years:
People want the information they need, when they want.
And you can charge them money for that.
7 Website Issues To Monitor To Ensure Subscription Success
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the biggest lessons we learnt running a successful subscription website was to constantly monitor the site network. Here’s our quick summary, all this and more in Niche Content Millionaire.
1. Clarity of purpose and message
Your web site must, from the home page onwards, have a clarity that ensures visitors, whether new or returned, instantly understand what you are on about.
2. Cleanliness and Navigation
Your web site must make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for, it must guide them in a natural, enforced way around the pages. Menus with a couple of dozen options, or four sub-levels are counter-intuitive. Instead focus on providing immediate access to key information, and then creating a simple path deeper into the site to the less important data.
3. Compelling and Contemporary
What is contemporary today will be yesterday’s chip wrapper as the saying goes in Britain. A site that is contemporary in its visuals and content will appeal to visitors more than a site that has been sitting there waiting for a few years in the hope that the fashion trend it was built around is going to come around again. A bit like corduroy and shoulder pads. Your site should have features and functions that compel visitors to stay long enough for your marketing message to take hold.
4. Consistency and Cross Browser
The ongoing development of web browsers is the bane of a web developer’s life. It’s essential you check your site in multiple browsers. Does the site look and function correctly, and consistently, across all these browsers?
5. Code that Works
How often have you visited a web site, and something didn’t work? We see it all the time, and it’s even more puzzling on very large successful web sites. It makes you wonder just how often they test their web sites – and it means you must test test test. Don’t just rely on something that used to work, continuing to function. Things break
6. Calls to Action
Remember your objective is to make money. You need a sales funnel – a sequence of events on your site through which your visitors move that are pushing them towards handing over their credit card details and paying you money. To some degree it’s easy to work out whether the devices on your site are working – if you ain’t got purchases, then it’s a fair conclusion something is wrong. But if you do have sales, the question becomes whether you can lift the sales rate by tweaking the calls to action, the prompts and text that encourage visitors to purchase. These are mission critical issues that must be constantly monitored, evaluated and if necessary amended to maintain or improve your sales.
7. Check Out
Once customers get to the pointy end and enter their details and credit card number, it is essential that the check out process operates simply and smoothly. You want the minimum of fuss and complexity. Test this constantly. Don’t just click through to the purchase page and leave it at that, you need to test the whole sale process, through to the email you send to acknowledge the purchase.
How to make billions, literally, from online publishing
Posted by: | CommentsMark Glaser has a terrific interview on Media Shift with IDG Publishing Chairman and Founder Patrick McGovern. IDG is a tech publishing business with $3.2 billion in revenue last year, and a network of 450 web sites. IDG has been transitioning a lot of content from print to online. Online now accounts for 48% of revenue with a goal of 50% by 2010.
McGovern gives the example of InfoWorld, that has moved from print to online, and revenue is up 10% overall. Whilst they’ve lost some income from advertising, the significant drop in expenses – printing, distribition and so forth – makes up for the loss and more. IDG has shifted other publications including editions of PC World to online.
However, it’s a market-specific decision, he gives the example of India where 3% of people have internet access and print is hot.
One aspect I found fascinating is how IDG leverages its content and audience (40 million visits a month) to charge companies for sales leads. This is apparently a major part of their business, and adds a whole new dimension to a content driven web site:
With lead generation through webcasts and white papers and with other techniques, we generate a nice profile of someone who’s really in the buying process for a product. And we try to describe for a client the next logical step in the buying process. We can then survey the leads after two or three months. We can find out, for instance, if we gave them 500 leads and found that a third of them bought a product in May, and that means $660 in total profit per average lead. And if we’re charging them $100 per lead we can go to them and say, ‘We’re giving you $660 in cash profit and you’re only paying us $100.” So we’re doubling our price to $200 and aren’t finding real sales resistance.
The interesting thing about leads is that we’ve been able to double the income per lead by demonstrating its profit contribution to the client.
This highlights how some lateral thinking about your content, audience and online properties can yield significant revenue opportunities.
McGovern says online advertising makes up only 3 or 4% of their annual growth rate of 35% to 48% over the past three years.
Since we focused on cost-per-lead (CPL), we’re getting much higher revenues. About 50% of our growth is from price increases and 50% from volume increases, so at a time when most people are having difficulty retaining price integrity, we find that we don’t need to discount because they show the economic value of the lead.
Steve’s Brilliant plan to save newspapers
Posted by: | CommentsSteve Brill, the inventor of Court TV and a prominent media businessman, author and lecturer has teamed up two two similarly well-credentialed friends, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery, Jr. to found Journalism Online, a new business “that will quickly facilitate the ability of newspaper, magazine and online publishers to realize revenue from the digital distribution of the original journalism they produce.”
It’s the big story of the day in the media and paid content world, I’m gettting 340+ ’similar stories’ on Google News. Journalism Online’s site says the project will have four activities:
- A password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
- Market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
- Negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
- Provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue
Opinion appears divided. Indeed, Henry Blodget at Business Insider says someone else tried to get almost the same idea off the ground a year or so ago, but simply didn’t have the same size PR megaphone. This is not encouraging. Valley Wag isn’t impressed either:
“Brill’s only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they’re better off buying overpriced content management “solutions” than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming.”
At the press conference Crovitz trotted out the same old same old examples of paid subscription success: ConsumerReports.org, WSJ.com and FT.com.
I think the key will be the way in which the news items from disparate publications are aggregated and presented. A simple business selling passes to online newspapers isn’t particularly interesting. It’s the contexualization and presentation of the content that will be key.
However, whilst I respect the people behind the project, one cannot help but wonder if this is a strategy akin to herding cats. Whilst media outlets might occasionally profess unanimity in tackling the issues facing the industry, actually getting them all to agree to something is another task again.
101 Things You Should Know Before Starting A Membership Website
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle works in mysterious ways sometimes. I have some Google Alerts set up for keywords like ’subscription content’ and ‘membership websites’, plus feeds off Google News coming into my Google Reader (see my public feed). This article ‘101 Things You Should Know Before Starting A Membership Website‘ popped up this morning, and I read throught avidly.
I posted a comment on the article telling author Miles Galliford how much I enjoyed the list, and how it would have been nice to access to this kind of insight when we started Arts Hub way back in 2000.
It’s not exactly uncommon to see online service providers try to build up content to act as an attractant to their business, to make themselves look like they know what they are talking about. Then hit you with a hard sell. Miles deserves applause for a) actually creating content that goes way beyond simply promotion; b) not wacking you around the head with the promotion for his company, subhub.com. They have a hosted subscription content web site service which looks great, although I’ve not had the pleasure of giving it a try.
Heartily recommend checking this article out.
Top 10 Tips for Press Releases
Posted by: | CommentsWe’re gearing up for the launch of Niche Content Millionaire, and one of the marketing strategies will be to send out a press release. I suspect in these days of online news some businesses forget the ‘traditional’ media. And it’s to their detriment. Here in Melbourne a small mention from one of the leading radio talkback hosts, or a snippet in the main daily newspapers, can garner significant web site traffic.
A few years ago in response to a query from a marketing web site I put together a list of my pet peeves about press releases, seen from the media outlet side. I thought it might be opportune to revisit the list, and re-work it from the marketer’s angle.
- Email, don’t mail. I’m flabbergasted at the number of people who still post a press release. Huge cost, and no greater chance of success. Having said that, double check what mode they prefer, some newspapers for example still prefer fax.
- Don’t send massive attachments. Back in our Arts Hub days I was always amazed when publicists emailed their releases as 5Meg PDFs, with no text in the body of the email.
- Make sure attachments have file extensions, so the poor deprived non-Macintosh folks can open them.
- Always remember the ‘6 friends’. (”I have six friends who serve me true: their
- names are WHAT and WHERE and WHY and HOW and WHEN and WHO.”). These
- are the mechanical fundam.
- Never hassle a journalist for a story. Nothing wrong with ringing and checking the release made it to the recipient, but being rude to a journalist is the fast track way to be ignored.
- Always tailor for the audience. Make sure the information you send the media outlet is suited to that outlet. Don’t just blast away, there’s no point sending a release about cars to a food magazine unless you can explicitly find an angle.
- Check your spelling and grammar. Why should the journalist take the trouble to research and write a story when you can’t take the time to write English?
- Avoid outlandish, unsupportable claims. i.e.: “The greatest product on earth!” It probably isn’t. Get creative and find the unique angle which works.
- Always list contact details, and always be available. I lost track of the number of times our editorial staff tried to call someone about a press release and couldn’t get their calls returned.
- Finally, you have to work the story – simply sending 1,000 press releases out to the blue yonder gets you nowhere. You would be far better researching the top 20 media outlets in your niche, and putting in the effort to tailor a release for each one, and following them up assiduously.
31 Days to Build a Better Blog
Posted by: | CommentsI’m thoroughly enjoying Darren Rowse’s ‘31 Days to Build a Better Blog‘. Suspect we’ll see a book or report or paid training program at the end of it all, but that’s fine, it’s good content well communicated. Darren reckons he’s past 9,100 or so people signed up for the 31 days, so clearly an indicator of how well regarded he is, and how much people value his contributions.
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