Spam is a hell of a way to make money– or so says my neighbour.
“I have a friend who sells Viagra online– makes over a million dollars a year,” he said to me a while ago, as I nodded in acknowledgement. “You could get into this business if you wanted to.” This was true, I guess.
The other day someone told me that my blog “had no business model.” In a sense, they were right. I’m not trying to get you to buy something on here, except maybe my credibility. This blog’s purpose is basically to help me build audience, which helps me sell books, and eventually to charge pretty decent sums for speaking fees, etc.. All are credibility buys to get to the top of the food chain.
But that’s not an excuse. I do leave money on the table. So do you.
A few weeks back a pretty well known speaker told me he was hanging out in Vegas with some affiliate marketers, and that after leaving the stage, they told him he’d “left over $100,000 on the table” by not selling the audience on something at the end of his speech. This was also true. I’ve been in the room during hard-sell talks that caused feeding frenzies. They work.
When you get into this space, you realize that because you’re speaking, writing, etc., you can basically insert a sales pitch anywhere. Some of these are classy, but many of them are not.
What money you choose to leave on the table says a lot about who you are. My friend Mitch has something called The Gladwell Test that he uses to decide for him, that goes “Would Malcolm Gladwell do this?” If you are a certain calibre of speaker/writer/blogger, then there are things you just won’t do.
Look, there is a lot of money to be made on the web these days. It’s everywhere, and if you can think about selling it, someone is already doing it somewhere. But if you are one of those hard-sell, squeeze page people, that is all you will ever be.
Delay monetization (or cancel it) as often as possible. Here, you will rise as high as the best work you do, but you will also fall as low as the worst tactics you’re capable of. Choose wisely.
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