Make Money Online With Snowboardjohn

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 I think one of the worst things that people allow to happen to themselves is: to become comfortable… before they achieve what they REALLY want for themselves.

In our middle class, western society, most of us will never hit rock bottom. No matter how much we suck.

But is that a good thing?

Sure, for those who never had a chance, it IS a good thing. But my guess is that if you’re reading this blog, you have access to a computer, an internet connection, and have enough knowledge and time to read my blog.

And for you, I’m not sure if it IS a good thing.

Because you can sit in your comfortable rut - hating work, but accepting it - for the rest of your life.

You can have 2.3 children, drive a boxy but safe car, and make monthly credit card payments… and never really need to push yourself beyond that.

There is no wolf who will ever come to blow your house down.

You must be your own wolf, and you must inspire terror, or pleasure, into your own heart if you want to move beyond where you are.

Our society is the Tylenol which will let you sleep groggily through the rest of your life - if you let it.

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I remember when I first started Adwords advertising in early 2004.

Back then there was no “quality score”, and you could dump thousands of keywords into one ad campaign and click “go”.

It was a simple time. But it was also a wasteful time.

Because it was so easy to get a ton of PPC traffic, you never really had to optimize your landing page, you never really had to worry about maximizing visitor value - most of the time the visitor value was really high, and you could get an enormous volume of visitors for almost no money.

Fast forward 4 years and the reality of online business has changed.

Getting targeted web traffic is harder every day. When you get a visitor to your website you MUST maximize what they spend, and you must do that as efficiently as possible.

Regardless of whether you are paying for traffic, or getting SEO traffic, you absolutely must extract the highest $$ dollar amount from each and every visitor.

For me personally, this challenge has been 4 years of testing and refining my front end marketing.

Using optin pages, blog landing pages, article landing pages, sales letter landing pages, video optin landing pages, pop up landing pages, hover over landing pages, and so on.

Eventually though I figured out a way that has increased my visitor value by 1000% - in virtually every market I’ve used it in.

Even more interestingly, I’ve actually been able to use this same method to drive a huge amount of traffic to new websites - getting over 40,000 visitors in one month to a brand new website without spending ONE CENT on traffic.

To read about the technique I call “Hinge Marketing” check out this page.

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Following a recent discussion about “Web 2.0″, I felt it would be a good idea to discuss the nature of social media itself - and break it into chunks that allow you to really understand one of the most successful social media websites built so far: Facebook.

One of the reasons I dislike the label “Web 2.0″ so much is that it’s FAR too general. And so is “Social Media” for that matter.

Social Media is not all alike by any stretch - different types of social media do different things. Some aggregate information, some produce content, some enable more personal and frequent communication between people, some replicate social experience and attempt to create venues in which users can interact with each other the same way they would in real life.

Also complicating the nature of social media further, is the nature of the social media members (or “society”) that enables the social media.

For example:

If the website produces content - knowing what motivations the content producers have for creating that content is very important - both as a user who needs to be discriminatory when reading the information, and as a marketer who may want to use the social media to gain a top social media users attention and therefore enhance market reach.

So let’s start by categorizing the most popular social media sites into two sub groups with their separate uses, based on the “output” of the website:

CONTENT CREATION AND AGGREGATION SITES - AS A MARKETER, LEVERAGING THESE INCREASE YOUR REACH AND POSSIBLY INCREASE YOUR CREDIBILITY

1. User Contributed News Sites - Digg.com, Reddit.com, Slashdot.org, Sumbleupon.com, Social Bookmarking - these news sites rely on their own users finding, summarizing, and then submitting and voting on particular web pages they find. These sites DO NOT produce content, however, they can be a tremendous source of traffic for a web page that receives enough votes from the individual news sites user base.

Motivation of the active submitting/voting members: Gaining a large network of fellow news submitters who will vote for their own stories when they submit them. People who regularly participate in news sites do so to further their own business exposure - a good example of how members network their way to the top of these news sites was written by Maki from DoshDosh.

Marketing Opportunities: Increase market reach enormously and very cheaply. Also it can be argued that by being seen on the front page of Digg or Slashdot you receive some extra credibility because of the implied social proof needed to get on the front page.

Marketing Problems: Networking into the path of top social media contributors is time consuming and has no definite outcome - anything could happen. Compounding the problem is that many internet users who read social media sites are doing it for the stimulation of an interesting story, and once they have their “hit of excitement” they never return to your web site.

2. User Contributed Content Sites - Wikipedia.com, Squidoo.com, Mahalo.com, Youtube.com - these sites rely on their active members producing hundreds of thousands of pages of content. Many people don’t realize that Google.com is also a user contributed content site - it relies on content producers creating content it indexes in a website that becomes a hub for the general public to visit. Obviously user contributer content sites are incredibly lucrative if you can make the model work - but that’s no easy task.

Motivation of the active content producers: Gaining traffic to their own website, and/or monetizing the content they write on the social site itself through contextual advertising programs such as Adsense. Some content producers are also highly motivated by recognition and prestige - like the wikipedia writers.

Marketing Opportunities: Like the users contributed news sites, the content sites have the capability to increase market reach enormously. Also, the content sites have a built in opportunity to pre-sell the website visitor on the website you are promoting, or, you as an expert. Being cited by Wikipedia as a source can both drive a large amount of traffic to your site as well as categorize you as a “trusted” site far more then your site being listed in the search results ever could.

Marketing Problems: Competition! Because of the potential upside of being cited as a wikipedia source, or being a top youtube channel - every man, every company, and anyone with an interest in increasing market reach is falling all over themselves to leverage this opportunity. Barriers to entry include ALREADY having market reach you can leverage to build your profile on these sites, as well as being able to afford giving away content that most people would have to CHARGE MONEY FOR to break even on the content creation in the first place.

COMMUNITY COMMUNICATION SITES - AS A MARKETER LEVERAGING THESE, YOU POSSIBLY DEEPEN YOUR ESTABLISHED COMMUNITY BOND

3. Social Chatter Sites - Twitter.com, Jaiku.com, Pownce.com - these sites allows users to micro blog about their everyday life.

Motivation of the active participants: To connect and chat with friends/family members, and follow along in the lives of “well known people” or celebrities.

Marketing Opportunities: To engage your followers more frequently, in a more personal way. This may result in higher take up of your offers from a group of people who may trust you more because they feel they know you more then they otherwise would.

Marketing Problems: Does not increase market reach at all. Only allows a closer relationship with customers and prospects you already have.

4. Socializing Facilitation Sites - Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Bebo.com, Friendster.com - these sites attempt to create a social environment in which users can express their own personality and interact with other users in way that resembles real life as closely as possible.

Motivation of the active socializer’s: To talk and interact with friends/family and possibly to make new friends. Interest groups are popular on these sites and resemble clubs in real life. Membership into these groups is often simple and straightforward.

Marketing Opportunities: Like the Social Chatter Sites these sites can facilitate a closer relationships with current customers and prospects through the user groups. These sites can also be a source of traffic if you develop an application that becomes popular.

Marketing Problems: Unless you’re monetizing Facebook/Myspace application or layouts businesses - these sites do not increase market reach. Facebook also reserve the right to steal your business if it becomes profitable for them to do so. Top marketers have also reported that users of these sites can be very resistant to marketing.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Content creation/news aggregation sites can increase your market reach and credibility, while social communication sites can be leveraged to increase community bond.

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I’ve been amazed at the extremely SHIT quality advice around on “how to get more blog comments” - and how to begin starting community conversations.

So in this post I’m first going to explain the different types of social structures that encourage blog comments, and then lay down an exact blueprint for getting more of the topical comments that help build awareness and word of mouth traffic about your blog (and business).

Last night I read FIFTEEN “how to get more blog comments” posts, and was disgusted to see that ALL OF THEM were COMPLETE CRAP. (Some of them were from people who should know better too.)

I actually feel that giving people rhetorical “be nice and helpful” advice is toxic - because people waste years of their lives trying to be nicer and more helpful then they already are - and never end up GETTING ANYWHERE.

So before you read on, understand that I’m NEVER going to suggest you get blog comments by:

1. Being MORE helpful.
2. Responding to any and all blog comments you get.
3. Being controversial (that’s such a vague fucking piece of advice, it’s right up there with “be more helpful”)
4. Asking for feedback (Puleez, if people don’t feel like responding, that isn’t going to change just because you ASK them to - telling people to ask for feedback is such weak advice it sickens me)

So SBJ, how DO you get more blog comments? Glad you asked!

First of all, let us examine some random blogs which already get a large VOLUME of comments:

• Shoemoney
• Bob Parsons
• Perez Hilton
• John Chow

If you visit these blogs, you will notice they get a large volume of comments. However, you may also realize these blogs get a VERY LARGE volume of traffic to go with those comments.

In fact, if you were to break down the visitor/comment ratio, you would discover that as a percentage, these blogs really don’t get many of their visitors leaving comments, or participating in community discussions.

Some do, but most don’t. My guess is it’s LESS then ONE PERCENT of visitors who leave comments.

So using these blogs as models for community conversations is actually a BAD IDEA. Also keep in mind that many of the people who leave comments on niche marketing blogs like John Chow, or Shoemoney are just doing it to try and get more exposure for their own blog and business.

And unless your blog is perceived to get a similar market reach of Chow and Shoemoney, you won’t get people motivated to leave comments on your blog to get themselves exposure - so don’t even bother trying.

No, to get topical conversations going we must understand WHAT MOTIVATES people to stand up in a crowd and say “here’s what I think!”

One of the luxuries I have as being a large list owner in several different markets is that I see the response rate for different types of messages.

I can change my message, I can play off of different emotions, and I can literally MEASURE the rate at people respond to what I send them.

An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that as a percentage, people are FAR MORE likely to respond to an email message then they are to respond to a blog post.

A blog post is very impersonal. It’s you talking from a podium to a room of people. People KNOW when they read a blog post that they are part of the crowd who is listening to you. And like a person in a crowd, they have a lot of social self consciousness to overcome when it comes to SPEAKING IN FRONT OF EVERYONE.

It’s amazing the rude “fuck off” messages people are happy to send through an email account - because the social environment allows them to act invisibly. The same person who sends “fuck off” email messages is probably extremely POLITE when the social pressure changes, but through the anonymity of an email account, that person will be as obnoxious as the social pressure they feel ALLOWS them to be.

A persons behavior is dictated by social pressure FAR MORE then most consumers are aware of. (I say consumer because it’s slang for “uneducated person who reacts to their emotions as if those emotions are REAL and follow what they FEEL unquestioningly”).

Until you are aware of the EXTENT to which your and my behavior is dictated by social pressure you will find it impossible to influence that behavior. Don’t be a naive idealist that says “people shouldn’t care what other people think” - people DO AND ALWAYS WILL care what other people think about them. It doesn’t matter why (and it’s evolutionary btw), just accept it as fact and move on to HOW do I use this to my advantage?

ADVANCED CONCEPT: It’s easier to to appeal to a persons fear then a persons self interest. People will do more to avoid pain then they will to gain pleasure. Hence it is easier to to make people internally UNCOMFORTABLE enough through a post which FORCES them to voice their thoughts - because NOT voicing them would actually cause them more misery then speaking in front of a crowd does.

Let’s look at some more blogs which get a lot of comments:

1. Standup101
2. BlueHatSEO
3. itsChrisCrocker (a youtube video blogger)

As you can see, these blogs have a very varied subject matter. But they get a LARGE PERCENTAGE of their readers RESPONDING to what they write (or communicate).

Now BlueHatSEO gets a lot of comments for different reasons then the other two - but I’ve included it because people who are very knowledgeable in their markets may be able to do what Eli does.

The comments BlueHatSEO gets are mostly clarifying questions. People want more information, and they are prepared to speak up so that they DON’T MISS OUT. They don’t want to look stupid, but Eli speaks with so much authority, in such a logical way that people are SURE he has an answer they NEED and MUST HAVE . They RISK “looking stupid” to avoid the bigger pain of MISSING OUT.

Lucy and Chris get comments for a different reason (and this reason is very accessible and replicate-able).

It’s NOT because they are controversial - it’s because they POLARIZE people’s CORE VALUES.

People have an internal set of core values - some of which they are taught, and some of them I believe they were simply born with. Their values are hardwired INSTINCTUALLY, through evolution.

Humans are empathic to others because we are pack animals. We live in large, organized, hierarchical, social structures. These social packs occur naturally because it’s how we’ve evolved as a species.

And when people have their HARDWIRED values challenged they FEEL THEY MUST RESPOND. Internally NOT responding causes them more pain and misery then speaking up in front of a crowd.

In fact, when it comes to core values, people want to share their gospel with everyone - whatever that gospel may be.

The key however (and this is where you MUST BE VERY CAREFUL) is to keep on topic. Attention for attentions sake is useless. You want organized, purposeful, useful attention.

I believe Chris Crocker will never be as financially successful as similarly infamous gay youtube video blogger William Sledd - because William Sledd has used his ability to polarize, around a TOPIC that clothing companies have a COMMERCIAL INTEREST IN.

William Sledd dishes out fashion advice in a very polarizing way - people love him or hate him. But, he keeps his focus directed squarely on FASHION. And thus garners a large conversation ABOUT FASHION - not about RANDOM CORE VALUES.

The key is to know what core values people have, and then play to those values in an ON TOPIC kind of way.

So let’s take a look at some common core value themes/polarizations, and then we’ll talk about how to use them TOPICALLY:

• HONESTY - TREACHERY
• GREEDY - ALTRUISTIC
• LOVE - HATE
• DISCIPLINE - SELF INDULGENCE
• HELP OTHERS - SOCIOPATHIC
• GET RECOGNITION - FLY UNDER THE RADAR
• UNDERDOG - ESTABLISHED CHAMPION

A powerful example of “Helping Others” was executed by Marketer Jason Moffatt a few months ago when he asked his readers to help a woman who was a fellow marketer, who had an abusive husband and had fled her home.

She was stranded in a shelter with no money. Unfortunately Jason has removed his post, but click on the link and read the comments which are still there - you will get a real feeling for what I’m talking about when you read through them.

The post received an enormous commentary both from people who wanted to help AND WHO WANTED TO VOICE THEIR CORE VALUE OF HELPING ANOTHER PERSON IN NEED.

Similarly, Buzz Marketer Dean Hunt received an enormous percentage of his visitors commentary when he tapped into peoples underdog feelings against the established champion (and big bully) Google. People don’t like dictatorial behavior and will stand up and voice their “fairness” values when an opportunity they feel strongly about presents itself.

YOU MUST GIVE YOUR READERS THAT OPPORTUNITY IF YOU WANT THEM TO RESPOND AND LEAVE COMMENTS!

But you must do it TOPICALLY.

Jason Moffatt was helping a MARKETER who other marketers could relate to.

Dean Hunt was giving the finger to Google’s treatment of small webmasters. Other small webmasters wanted to join him and voice their support for the cause.

So now you understand a few powerful ways to get blog comments… I’m going to ask you a TOUGH question:

Do you really NEED blog comments?

Here’s some well read blogs who make it impossible (or almost impossible) for you to leave them comments:

• Seth Godin
• Aaron Wall
• Ralph Tegtmeier

Of all the marketers in the world who would encourage marketing conversations - you would THINK that Seth Godin would be LEADING the pack.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t want your comment.

Why? This is what he says.

Personally though, I only think he’s telling you half the story in that post.

He doesn’t allow comments because he is EXTERNALIZING the marketing conversation. He knows if you can’t talk about what he writes on HIS BLOG, you will have to DO IT ON YOUR OWN BLOG.

This increases his blog reach dramatically because instead of a centralized conversation on the Seth Godin blog, he gets a DECENTRALIZED conversation about the Seth Godin blog all over the internet and blogosphere!

ADVANCED CONCEPT: It’s not really about blog comments - it’s about topical community conversations that directly or indirectly involve something YOU have said. WHERE those conversations take place is dependent on your “market brand recognition” and “market celebrity”.

The more social proof you have, the more people who know who you are, the more you should EXTERNALIZE the conversations that take place around you, your blog, your business, and your brand. This has a LOGARITHMIC progression affect on your market reach. Instead of the linear progression you get from simply allowing people to comment on your blog. Perez Hilton could increase his reach enormously if he didn’t allow blog comments.

However, if you have very little recognition, small reach, and are building things up - then allow comments and a centralized community to form around you - and then decentralize the conversation.

Remember that you don’t NEED a ton of comments on every post, and that subscriber numbers and subscriber RESPONSIVENESS is a much better indicator of your post quality then comments are.

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I don’t know John Chow or Shoemoney, and until recently I had never heard of either of them.

Anyway, I just read a post on John Chows blog that irritated the hell out of me.

It was called “When You Should Put Ads On Your Blog“. In it Chow argues that a new blog should be monetized from the “get go”.

Something that he didn’t actually do on his blog - but yet - he posts a strong opinion about it without really thinking about the evidence that may support or not support such a position.

Shoemoney for his part (now don’t get me wrong, I’ve read a few of Shoemoney’s posts now and can see he is very good at certain traffic/monetization exploits) also wrote about this in a post called “If You Don’t Place Ads On Your Blog Now You’ll Hate Yourself Later“. [edit update: apparently shoemoney does not suggest you should put ads on your blog before traffic - the post on his blog has been reported as a guest post]

And both Chow and Shoemoney cite themselves, as well as Techcrunch, and Engadget as reference points for WHY monetizing a blog from the beginning is a good idea. The fact that these guys and their reference points are already social proofed up the wazoo seems to have escaped them.

Let me say clearly: monetizing a blog that you spend time writing and promoting - with the intention of turning into an authority blog - from the start is a HORRIBLE idea.

And there are many good reasons for this - most of them I covered in my recent post entitled “Why Direct Response Blogging Is The Answer” - a post which made the front page of Sphinn, got Brian Clarks (author of copyblogger) attention, Woody Maxim (millionaire ex adult webmaster) posted about it, along with numerous shout outs that were emailed to me.

So read my post and then reconsider your blog market entry monetization strategy!

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This post is going to be a business analysis of a Standup Comedians blog, written by a very sweet girl called Lucy.

Lucy wrote to me a while back and told me how much she appreciated my blog, and asked me to come visit her blog and “tear it up” (or something to that effect).

She actually reminds me of myself when I was a young up’n'coming snowboarder. Ambitious, angry, wanting to “hit it big” by making a difference in the world.

Unfortunately, while you can make it by being Ambitious’n'Angry - I feel you are REALLY TYING YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR OWN BACK BY TRYING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Business is about one thing: money.

Those who have not succeeded at business yet may vehemently disagree with me on that one. Likewise, those who have hit it huge may also disagree with me on that one.

But they would both be disagreeing for different reasons - and that difference is the reason why my point is so important.

Let me tell you a story about my Mom:

My Mom currently runs a very successful Consulting Business. She’s turned from an Academic Researcher and Lecturer into a great marketer and a very calculated business thinker. But she hasn’t always been as good as she is now.

A few years ago when she was starting her business she told me how much she loved being an entrepreneur - and how it was a “big adventure”. (She’s quite an adventurous person and loves to travel and do new things).

She struggled. She often did things in business that aligned with her sense of adventure. “Try this out, see how it goes, fly by the seat of my pants. ADVENTUROUS.”

She also likes helping people. Being helpful is a very high value thing to her and so she wanted to incorporate that into her business thinking and behavior. She figured: “sure I want to make money at this, but I also want it to be an adventure and really help people”.

So that’s what she did. And she struggled and fought and struggled some more. Eventually, over the years, she listened to what I’d been telling her - so much so that she reminds me of this lesson all the time and keeps me from straying off the path:

When your reason for being in business is anything other then money - you SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE the effectiveness of your business - so much so that it (or you) may NEVER end up succeeding.

This is because you are making micro decisions all the time - about: what you pay attention to, what you learn about, what your unconscious mind is problem solving and so on. These micro decisions SERIOUSLY IMPACT the net overall effect of YOU as an entrepreneur.

In poker, the only people who play in stakes where losing hurts for reasons other then making money are known as “fish”.

Maybe they do it for the “Adventure” of playing high limits - who knows? Who cares? All I know is that the probability of them beating me is almost zero - and that’s because my money motivation is so high that I know all the hand percentages off by heart. I know the chance of a pocket pair hitting trips on the flop is 7-1, and for me to call preflop and expect a long term profit I need to be getting 7-1 on my money, either by having 7 other players in the pot before I go in, or have implied pot odds of at least 7-1.

I know the minute mathematical details BECAUSE I WANT TO WIN MY OPPONENTS MONEY.

If I was motivated by FUN and ADVENTURE - I would never have the motivation to learn all the PAINFULLY BORING - but TOTALLY NECESSARY math you need to win at poker!

If I was motivated by BEING DOMINANT - I would also lose at poker. People who noticed my tendency for my ego to make my decisions would exploit me for it. They would PUNISH me for being motivated by anything other then money.

Focusing on Making $$ FORCES you to… guess what?…

BE A PROFESSIONAL.

The difference between an Amateur and Professional isn’t only that the pro gets PAID to be there - it’s that the pro’s ONLY REASON for being there is the money! Amateurs are in it for their own reasons, pro’s are in it to get paid.

This shift in mindset produces a VASTLY different result in your own life - it FOCUSES you like a LAZER on things you need to focus on to BECOME a pro at whatever you’re doing. Instead of screwing around trying to live a few of your values in business, you are focusing ONLY on things that increase your NET WORTH.

Look, I’m not saying DON’T HAVE VALUES - I’m saying - live those values outside of your business.

Getting back to Lucy I would say: focus solely on the comedy. I know you want to make a difference, and make people think after your shows - but - as a professional comedian your job is to make them laugh. That’s where the money is.

Go for the money.

In his book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting” Robert Mckee states that the biggest problem with up’n'coming movie script writers is that they write “anti plot, anti stories”.

What this means is that they try and write the Next Pulp Fiction, instead of writing the Next Forrest Gump.

Sure “s/he wins in the end, defeats a few problems along the way, gets the boy/girl in the end” stories are predictable - and so - screen writing students TRY NOT to write them. But Mckee points out that they’ll never be a professional writer UNTIL THEY MASTER THEM.

Mckee’s whole book is not just about convincing new screen writers that they must learn the craft of Single Protagonist hero stories - but - it’s a blueprint “how to” that reveals writing those hero stories is MUCH HARDER then it appears.

And that’s the next lesson: it’s not until you are solely motivated to make money in your business that you discover being a heartless entrepreneur like me is much harder then it appears

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