What Tom Cruise Can Teach Us About Business Sanity
I’ll never forget Tom Cruise losing his mind on the various talk shows last year (or was it the year before?)
The site of a major star going completely bonkers on national television was more than a little sad.
Anyway, when I look at people who’ve made no progress on their business in the last two years, I can’t help but feel they’re making similar mistakes to Cruise.
Because ultimately the problem Business Owners (and Cruise) make is paying attention to a rigid set of Dogma - that make no sense in the real world.
Things like “slow and steady wins the race” or “sustainable businesses are best developed in traditional market places” or “the leading edge of innovation is a bloody edge” etc. etc.
It’s all COMPLETE CRAP.
Sure: innovation is risky. Sure: fast cash flow can be gone tomorrow. Sure: traditional market places have steady demand.
But so what?
If you’re using the internet medium to generate leads: NOTHING IS STABLE. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING ALL THE TIME.
Like it or not, REALIZE it or not: you are ALREADY in a fast changing, risky business environment.
I know people who have lost $30,000 NET/month PPC business OVERNIGHT in steady, traditional market places. And these weren’t affiliate marketers either, I’m talking about people who developed and sold their own QUALITY products going down the drain SUDDENLY.
OUCH!
But they were deluding themselves.
They thought because they had a quality product, because they had excellent customer support, because they had exceptional marketing: they had a stable business.
They didn’t.
Because they failed to understand they were REALLY in the business of GENERATING CHEAP LEADS.
Instead of spending that $30,000/month funding their LIFESTYLE, they should have been thinking bigger.
They should have been testing magazine ad placements. They should have been investing in type-in-traffic domains. They should have been doing EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO DESTROY THEIR RELIANCE ON SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC FROM THEIR LEAD GEN ACTIVITIES.
SEO, PPC => These are the HEROINE of our business model.
Use them to help kick start your business, but do not for a second believe that because you generate leads with these activities that you have a business.
You don’t. You just have a CASH FLOW HIT.
And that, to me, has no equity in it, and therefore there is no value in spending time on it, unless it’s part of a bigger plan.
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October 26th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
John,
Informative article. I’d like to make sure I understand what you’re saying here to edify myself more in this area.
“SEO, PPC => These are the HEROINE of our business model.
Use them to help kick start your business, but do not for a second believe that because you generate leads with these activities that you have a business.”
What if you’re in the lead generation business selling leads to companies who don’t generate them online for themselves. Would this model not be considered a genuine business model or would this qualify as being part of a bigger plan?
Also…”They should have been testing magazine ad placements. They should have been investing in type-in-traffic domains. They should have been doing EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO DESTROY THEIR RELIANCE ON SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC FROM THEIR LEAD GEN ACTIVITIES”
What are some of the other ways you would recommend to destroy search engine reliance and generate traffic besides the two ideas mentioned above?
By the way, I’ve spent this week reading all of your posts. You appear to be passionate about your blog content and I’m unlearning a lot of misinformation. You writing style and information just make sense to me.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Jen, whether you have a stable business model or not can easily be answered by this one question:
“If Google went under tomorrow, would your business still function the same way?”
If it would, then you’re fine - if it wouldn’t, then you need to try and exclude Google from your activities.
From my perspective it’s fine to get Google traffic to TEST markets and responsiveness, however, once tested and you decide to move forward you need to reinvest your profit into traffic which will probably be harder to get (sometimes much harder) then Google traffic, but considerably more stable.
The model I use for this blog is simply to get links from other high quality, high traffic blogs and resources. Links from these sources may increase my Google rankings - but that is not my goal - the links actually deliver a very large amount of traffic.
In this way this blog in NOT dependant on Google in any way, shape, or form. In reality, Google sends less then 20% of the traffic this blog gets.
In any market that’s worth a lot of money, it’s worth it to build a high quality resource type site - a high quality blog, a weekly youtube video report, perhaps a spreadsheet analysis of a particular market every Monday morning for your users (which will keep your market coming back to your website, and MAY get them passing it around).
Once the resource site is built, get it submitted to wikipedia as a source for wiki articles, get a lot of great content on it, and then start emailing the market leaders about specific posts, pages, or videos, or reports - don’t ask them to do anything, just tell them about it.
This work is slow, and sometimes difficult… but… when everyones sites gets raped by Google (again!)… and your traffic hardly changes… you’ll realize how worth it it all was.
October 26th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
One qualifier for the above strategy:
How much is the market worth? If it’s a high volume, low price point, low attention span, can’t add much value to the user, type market - then you’re probably better off just building a lot of sites and pages into them - think “churn and burn” rather then stability.
However if it’s a high price point, high attention span, opportunity to add a lot of value, then building stability in is a must.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Thank you John for insight.
February 16th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I’d never thought of it this way. It is really all about generating leads, period. Building a list is, in my book, one of my main objectives. But I had never taken such a simplified view of it before. Truly, the way to get off of search engine dependence is by building your list and working it right.