Day 14 30DC - Idol Rambling

The key to making money online is exactly the same as the key to making money offline (I know that's such a revelation). And that is knowing ahead of time what has the greatest chance of making money. Ed Dale (and others) have called this the American Idol approach. It's a great way to minimize risk and create a hungry market.

All of the Idol shows are superb at building up a following for the artist(s) and creating a pre-sold market for their CD releases. They know the winning artist will be successful at product sales because millions of people are voting for them. It's only a short hop from there to voting with their wallets by buying the winners' music.

Meanwhile, there's promotion and marketing going on in the background -- product licensing, images, blogs, and so on. Quite an amazing marketing machine that funds itself as it goes along. "Juggernaut" is the word for it.

In previous years' Thirty Day Challenges we've used a technique called "fly catching" which is to post a web page that is as compelling (sweet) as you can make it, and then open the windows (promote it with Pay Per Click advertising). The objective was to see how many flies (customers) would land on it and stick, meaning they'd like what they see and enter their e-mail contact info to get on your mailing list for future marketing.

Since people are a lot more discriminating than flies, it was very much a hit-and-miss approach.

This year, we are looking for those raving fans who are already consuming something as proven by our market research into our various niches. This is akin to having a very large group of people asking, "When's the next American Idol tryout?" The audience craves more, so it only makes sense to give it to them.

Makes marketing a whole lot more interesting, don't you think?