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?

Day 1 - Thirty Day Challenge Launches!

Can you believe it? More than 8,000 people have registered to participate in the 30 Day Challenge put on by Ed Dale, Dan Raine, and Nic Messe. That's pretty amazing. When was the last time 8,000 people signed up for something you were doing?

The much-anticipated launch, heralded by a couple of weeks of pre-season A/V mastery, stuttered a bit as much of the 30DC community were stymied by the .mp4 version of the first training video. All along, the organizers had been providing both streamed video and .mp4 versions as particpants were getting up to speed with iTunes, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 social media they had never before encountered. I realize the server demands for streamed video with 8,000+ hungry challengers all trying to access it at once would cause a performance hit, but dropping off the easy-to-use video (basically, just click and play) on day 1 was a bit of a shock to many. The forums lit up with calls for help and echoes of frustration. Too bad. The guys did see this coming, but dropped the ball a little in execution on the first day. Some explanation needed to be provided, or at least some warning. I say this because it's what I'm always advising my clients -- make life easy for the users, even if you think it is already easy. That's what we techwriters do -- anticipate user problems so solutions can be provided ahead of time.

The huge number of newly-initiated users may have been underestimated. As mentioned, challenge participants include people on dialup and those who have only ever used the default tools installed with Windows. Throwing Skype, Twitter, Firefox extensions, Facebook, and iTunes .mp4s at them all within hours of each other caused information overload and technical overload to boot.

I'm sensitized to user frustrations because of my job, so I see all the people running into walls. And I see walls people haven't hit yet. I also see the gaps.

But when you think about it, a little frustration is a teensie, weensie price to pay for the awesome value being provided -- FOR FREE -- in this training the lads are giving. Nothing comes without a cost. Learning, for sure, doesn't come without effort, sometimes pain, and yes, plenty of frustration. On the Scale of Value, the flea on one side is easily outweighed by the elephant on the other. No contest.

In today's broadcast alone, Ed gave the marketer's 4-part formula for success, and if you learn only that, you will improve your business efforts immensely. Register for the Thirty Day Challenge to get access to all of the valuable training.

What does Facebook have to do with Business?

We have been talking about Facebook, Digg and Del.icio.us, among other tools, in the Thirty Day Challenge. It occurred to me today, that these are the Web 2.0 equivalent of the business networking we used to do when we went to networking meetings at the Chamber of Commerce.

You young'uns have just digitized what we old fogies did in person. And of course, now that we have a global marketplace and a 24/7 information overload always-on environment, it makes sense to use these tools to conduct that aspect of business. Of course, they are great for your lifestyle applications too!

Getting an endorsement from someone else for your business was always extremely valuable. Now, in Web 2.0 style, you get a thumbs up or a 5-star rating from people anywhere in the world who thought your stuff has merit.

I almost hate to see those dots connected. Many business colleagues were flummoxed by Facebook and MySpace. That kept the competition out and we early adopters in. Trust the juggernaut that is internet marketing to find a way to almost spoil it in the process (to wit: many fake MySpace pages). But the pendulum has only begun to swing.



Legitimate marketers and business people are using the same leverage, with the same social media tools, to create authentic business opportunities and get that first dollar (or ten) while doing a lot of good in the process.

I haven't even begun to tap the potential of some of these tools, but by working through the material in the Thirty Day Challenge, I'm getting new ideas for how they could be used to help my students and clients immensely. The next month is going to be very exciting!