Make Money Online With Snowboardjohn

Dawud Miracle recently wrote a post about why your newsletter content should come from your blog.

I disagree with this idea quite strongly.

This is because it fails to separate two important processes that your business needs to execute as efficiently as possible:

1. Generate leads
2. Sell to those leads

A BLOG is 100% permission based. The only way you get visitors to it is by being relevant, useful, and interesting. To do this well, you have to give away a lot of value.

It’s the pollen you use to attract the bee’s who want to make honey with it.

A NEWSLETTER is far LESS permission based. Sure, the person has to sign up initially, but once signed up, you have direct access to send whatever you want to their inbox.

The newsletter is the bee farmer who extracts the honey from the bee’s.

In other words, the blog is a permission based traffic and lead generation tool - and a newsletter is a sales tool.

If you’re trying to use your sales tool to stimulate discussion on your blog, you’re being very inefficient in both attracting traffic and discussion, and you’re not maximizing revenue, because you’re using access to people’s inbox’s for reasons other than selling to them.

I disagreed with Seth Godin over one of his points about RSS and Email recently, which will further increase your understanding of this topic: R.S.S. And Email: The How, The When, The Why

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If you caught that internet guru rabbiting on about how it’s important to look like a big time company, I’ve got news for you:

It’s NOT.

The most important thing is to have a market entry point and an authentic marketing message with a genuine product/service that people want.

Pardon my French, but fuck looking like a 100 million dollar company if you’re not one.

Newsflash: people don’t like dealing with the AT&T’s of the world.

Heck, I seriously get in a plane and FLY 1000 miles to go see my dentist in the small town I grew up in, when I need a check up or a clean. It’s worth it too. Big city dentists are rich, indifferent, and offer an expensive poor quality service.

If you’re generating leads effectively (which is the hard part), and your website looks sucky, then all you need to do is explain it thusly:

“You may have noticed that my website doesn’t look as fancy as the MSN homepage. The truth is, I’m not a professional web or computer guy, I’m a professional accountant (or whatever) and while I do employ a graphic designer to update my site sometimes, I spend 99% of my time and energy servicing my clients. And while I have had the odd web visitor write to me and ask why my website looks a bit dated, I’ve never heard a single complaint from a client about the time, energy, and focus I put into delivering the best accounting service possible.”

Or something like that.

You could even make that particular point a marketing feature of your site. The headline could read:

Why Does This Accounting Site Look So Dated?

AND if you want to really go in for the kill, you could even brand yourself using the idea “George & Sons Accounting - We’re So Obsessed With Being The Best Accountants In Nashville, We Suck At Everything Else”.

Don’t fall for thinking you need to look big time. You don’t.

Unless you’re selling software, technology, and similar things where looking fancy makes sense - you will find being ghetto suffices, as long as you explain it real nice. Bokay?

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This is a 2 page PDF report I wrote last night after coming into contact with some people that reminded me that what I find common sense, other people need to work on.

Get the Regular Guy Guide here

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Jason Fried from 37signals.com recently wondered about what makes a “seamless user experience”.

He asked people to describe in 10 words or less, what they thought a “seamless use experience” was.

Nearly every person responded with a list of adjectives: simple, transition, smooth, uninterrupted, flowing, etc. etc.

Seth Godin even gave his thoughts about it. (Seth responded that he thought seams were important, as long as they have a purpose, and gave an analogy about a baseball).

Personally, I don’t like the parameters of the question. They lead to a meaningless answer.

An answer full of describing words (except Seths’, who answered on his blog and took as many words as he wanted).

In his book “On Writing”, Steven King points out that dialog is only meaningful when it takes place in the context of a story or situation that gives it meaning. He says that if he ever reads dialog that begins with “And she shrieked with horror…” or “He said with exhausted exasperation” he knows that the story is not worth reading.

This is because worthwhile communication can only take place in the context of illustrations - the most powerful form of which are real life examples/metaphors/situations, and the least powerful of which are adjectives - which don’t have any inherent meaning.

Imagine if you were trying to get better at Volleyball and the coach only ever gave you adjective instructions:

“No, no Sarah strike the ball in a more simple fashion.” or,

“Please, use a smoother stroke”.

For the confused Sarah, she would clearly be wondering what, exactly, the words “Simple”, and “Smoother” meant in the context of what she’s doing. She probably already perceives herself to be hitting the ball smoothly, so telling her to do that only frustrates and confuses her further.

What she (and whoever you are communicating with) needs is the definition of the adjectives we would give. Throw some verbs and nouns in there. Tell the person about your experience of what the adjectives you would otherwise use mean.

Instead of telling them about “smoothness” tell them about the time you were breathing super hard and noticed that you were shaking from the effort you’d been putting in. Explain that you’ve found counting to three while the ball is in the air and then driving your arm through at full extension, without a bend in the elbow is what creates a “smooth” stroke when you’ve been playing the game long enough to be breathing hard.

And when you discuss business reality, don’t allow yourself to be lazy and drift into adjective irrelevancy, just because you’re talking about concepts.

P.S. Want to read the work of people who REALLY know how to communicate? Then check out One Sentence Story and you’ll see some examples of people who COULD have answered the 10 words or less question about seamlessness effectively.

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