Dan Blank, Author at WeGrowMedia - Dan Blank

Fail Now, or Succeed Later

Too often, we pronounce something to be a failure way too soon. Corporations that rely on quarterly business cycles, or even yearly bonus cycles, sometimes feel forced to make quick decisions about the potential success of a given strategy.

In doing so, they fail to pivot, fail to iterate, fail properly measure, fail to listen to their customers, and fail to succeed.

Even when you look at personal projects, you often see a hint of what could be, if only there is enough passion to wait out the failure. Everyone is a failed writer before they are a successful writer.

To be okay when things become grim, when failure surrounds you, envelops you, and holds you down beneath the water – it takes an incredible sense of perseverance. Those who wait it out may find that success is just around the corner. Maybe patience was all that was needed, or a shift in the business model, or the right partnership or market timing.

I recently listened to the DVD commentary tracks on the TV show Entourage and the movie Good Will Hunting. In each, the creators told similar stories:

Entourage: The show’s creators had to wait something like two years from the deal with HBO to actually getting a pilot on the air, and then another nine months for the series to actually begin. Plus, there was the time they spent trying to sell it to HBO before the deal was even signed.
Again and again in he commentary track, you can hear it in their voices – how tentative there success was in the beginning, how it took a series of two steps forward, one step back type situations. Their success relied on so many factors, not just having a great idea and some connections.
Good Will Hunting: They had a very similar story, it took something like five years of work to slowly get people to support the project, to keep iterating and changing to make it better. Even when big names were attached, the movie wasn’t a done deal – it was constant effort to get someone to recognize it.
That it was nominated for and won Academy Awards can mask this uncertainty – a success can often seem like a foregone conclusion after the fact. And of course, what follows is tons of people say “I had that idea,” as if they idea alone was all it took to bring the movie into existence and make it a success.

Sometimes we rush to failure. There is fear embarrassment if something isn’t an instant success, and it is easy for people to give in to self-doubt, allowing others to define their experience, and their value.

Anything great that was ever achieved was likely wholly different than anything that came before it. It challenged others before it inspired them.

When we give in to failure too easily, we give in to mediocrity, to the leveling of new ideas down to the accepted middle. And if there is one thing we need – it’s people shooting for those great inspiring goals – of birthing something that has never been before, but the world desperately needs.

Thanks!

-Dan

How to Build Your Online Business – the Laura Roeder Interview

At 26 years old, Laura Roeder is making about $15,000 a month in consulting fees and has launched online coaching classes that bring in tens of thousands in revenue.

Laura Roeder Today I want to profile how she is building a successful online business
through information products and working with clients via the web. I am FASCINATED by how the web has removed barriers for businesses:

That we can learn from others without leaving our homes.
That we can grow businesses without leaving our homes.
That we can grow as individuals without leaving our homes.

So you can see, I have a real fascination with not leaving the house! But seriously – the opportunity that we each have to achieve our business and personal goals is so much closer than we think, and what people like Laura are doing is just incredible. I had a chance to speak with her, and below are key points from our chat.

In 2008 Laura transitioned her career from a web designer to focusing on online social media training and consulting. This change occurred because she kept listening to client’s needs and noticed a pattern, a common need that wasn’t being met:

“When I started my own business, I found I was always giving my clients advice about online marketing, social media, and how their website fits into their overall marketing plan. I thought is what a web designer should do, but I discovered that most web designers don’t do that. My clients told me that other designers never asked them those sorts of questions.”

“I had the realization in late 2008 that people would pay me just for the social media side, which just seemed outrageous to me. I think this is how a lot of people feel about whatever they’re good at – you take it for granted. Now I see what a big need there is.”

At this point Laura made a big decision, the type of decision that is life changing. Instead of slowly evolving, she jumped in with both feet:

“I fired all my web design clients because I knew that if I didn’t totally get rid of that, I would still be in that business model, which is not what I wanted to do. Then I had to make money with social media.”

Since she didn’t know how to break into working with big companies, and loved working with small businesses, she created her business to better cater to them. To get her initial clients, she started with what she had, and built from there:

“I moved to this online training program model that allows me to make money with lower priced programs that are appropriate for a small business. I loved it, but it was a struggle. I didn’t know any business owners. I found all my clients through networking events, which is a great way for any business to start a client base and to grow. A lot of people aren’t willing to do it. When people see you are a normal friendly human, being, they will hire you.”

Soon, Laura found she needed to make another evolution to her business, scaling her services:

“The thing about most service businesses is that you are always starting over. That’s what was so frustrating. I would get a client, and maybe spend a month or two chasing that client, trying to get the final contract signed getting ready to do that work. So you’ve got that long process, then you do the work for them, and then after that contract is over, it’s like you might as well not have done anything. You’re back at square one, and then you have to bring in a new contract. It’s a neverending cycle. I wanted to explore new models for new business, because I feel like I wasn’t getting anywhere.”

Through people such as Eban Pagan, she learned about online training programs as a business model, and made another big leap:

“I just gave it a shot. I see a lot of people who take courses like this and they pick and choose, or they aren’t willing to do it. I just took what I learned and tried it out. Some is exact, some is my own spin on these concepts.”

“I Learned the concepts of how do you craft programs that people really want to buy that have effective marketing baked in, how do you figure out what people want, how do you make the learning effective so people in the program actually take action.”

In March 2009, she created her first program: “Your Backstage Pass to Twitter.” She explains how she came to the decision to launch this product:

“I just gave it a shot. most people, as simple as it sounds, that’s the part that’s missing because they spend so much time analyzing or saying ‘this isn’t going to work for me,’ or ‘I have to get something established before I do that.’ I tell people this with social media all the time: you just have to jump in. The way to start using Twitter is to just create an account and start talking to people. You don’t have to have a perfect website first, you don’t have to have a Facebook fan page first, you don’t have to figure it all out before you create an account, you just have to jump in and give it a try. That is the only way you will make progress. I never really get how to do anything until I experience it for myself. You can read about it all day, but you don’t internally see how it works until you do it yourself.”

I asked her what she would do if no one signed up for her products, since I know that fear prevents many people from launching their own. She explained how even failure gives you great lessons:

“That’s the beauty about info products, nobody knows if no one is on your call! It’s a scalable business and a super low overhead business. That’s an excuse a lot of people use, being scared if no one signs up. But honestly, who cares if nobody signs up, you are going to learn a lot about the process by just doing it, and you’re going to learn a lot about what you can do better next time.”

Luckily, Laura did have people sign up. One of the most interesting points she made had to do with how she found her first customers:

“When I launched my first course, I had a list of people from my web design business, maybe 300 people, maybe even less, and they were all local in Chicago, and had all shown interest in me as a web designer. A lot of people overthink their own stuff, and would say these people were interested in me as a web designer, not social media stuff, and that’s what I thought at first, that I would have to start all over.

“But I realized, this is really not that much of a leap. These are small businesses interested in doing stuff online, and now I am targeting small businesses interested in doing stuff online, so let’s just send this out and see if they are interested. They can always unsubscribe. I also find a lot of people on Twitter, and I have a weekly newsletter that has gone out since the beginning of 2009, which has been a big way for me to grow my community. I always tell people, you have to start with what you’ve got, with where you are. I had a few hundred people, they were all in Chicago, and all sort of interested in a different business, but that’s what I had at the time, so that’s what I started with, and it grew from there.”

And grow it did. She was off to a great start:

“The first launch I made around $3,000, and the program cost $97. I thought that was astronomical. I used to spend so long trying to get one contract for $3,000. When I did websites, I would usually charge between $1,000-$2,500 for a site. And again, after that contract was over, I was back at zero. So to be able to make the money from one contract, and make it online with something I could sell over again, I was just thrilled. And, it worked. Anything that works, you can scale up. So once that happened, I knew I would forget about corporate consulting and make this my business model.”

Having good success so far, she moved forward with an even bigger launch, continually looking to scale her efforts:

“My next step was to keep growing my audience, so for me that was to keep doing my newsletter, to blog, and Twitter is the biggest one for me. 35% of all my traffic comes from Twitter, and that traffic does convert to buyers just as well as all the rest. Twitter has always been a big channel for me. I use Facebook differently, to connect with people who are already in my world.”

“What I did next was launch my next program called “Creating Fame” and that is one that will open again this Fall. It’s my really my big picture overview on how to create fame, which is to use social media to become the number 1 go-to person in your field. That came out of the work I did with a friend of mine who is an actress. Out of my work with her, I saw I could use those same strategies for myself for making myself “famous.” This was my first real launch.”

“Doing a launch is an enormous list builder and attention builder. If you Google my name, there’s so many blog posts that have been written about me from content from launches. A big reason why Creating Fame was so successful was not from my existing audience, but the new list I built just from the launch alone. Creating Fame was a $27,000 launch, which is insane, and way more than I expected. It’s such an intense process – just putting out my very best content and going full force for a month. I’m not going to say it’s as easy as just putting out great content, and you’ll sell stuff. I’ve learned a lot about selling from other people. It’s hard, but it definitely paid off.”

“I had about 40-50 people sign up. It was an 8 week online class with a live webinar each week. I like to do everything live and then record them to sell after the fact. I like the energy of doing things live. A year later, I still talk to a lot of the people who took that class. What’s really cool is that I see a lot of them talking to each other – they formed their own Facebook group and connected on Twitter. It’s a great value-add that people can connect with other like-minded businesses. A lot of people from Creating Fame still talk all the time.”

Over time, Laura has found that each of these launches have added up to a nice little product library:

“Along with Creating Fame, I created two programs that are my most popular: Zero to WordPress Blog and Zero to WordPress Website. I realized if people took the class, but didn’t know how to do there website, it would be useless. So I created these as bonuses that later became standalone courses to sell. Over time it create a good little product library to sell:

Creating Fame

Backstage Pass to Twitter

Zero to WordPress Blog

Zero to WordPress Website

Zero to SEO

For this Fall she is working on relaunching Creating Fame, and a new program partnering with Marie Forleo.

But that’s not all, in the Fall of 2009, Laura re-approached private consulting and coaching:

“The next big step for me was to get serious about doing private coaching and consulting. I now do 6 month contracts, I started with 3 month contracts, and it sold out in 48 hours. I had 15 spots for one-on-one coaching. Evidently, people had really been waiting for that. My consulting is less about social media – that’s only part of it. A lot of my clients are people who have businesses and are just looking to market them better online. I charged around $1,000 a month and they get regular calls with me and unlimited email with me. Honestly, I’m moving less and less towards that being a part of my business model – I really want to have more of my focus be on the online programs. It’s the whole thing about leveraging your time – getting more people in and doing Q&A’s with a larger group.”

Overall, it is fascinating to see how Laura has evolved her business, and how she has found personal value and business revenue by working with what she had, and having the confidence to simply move forward with an idea.

Laura leaves us with one final thought as to how businesses need to think about using social media:

“Just learning Twitter is not useful, you need to know how Twitter fits into your sales strategy and marketing strategy.”

You can connect with Laura on her website or Twitter.

What Publishers Can Learn From The Godfather

I watched The Godfather parts 1 and 2 last week, and realized how many layers I had missed when viewing them growing up. The movies had me considering how institutions are built, and how they are destroyed. And of course, this had me considering the current climate in the publishing and media worlds.

I’ll simplify the movies as a juxtaposition between two people:

Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) built and ran an empire by balancing harsh tactics with community balance. He understood that for his family to succeed, that he had to leave room for other families to succeed. He knew when to be strike and when to compromise. For instance, he didn’t seek revenge of the death of his eldest son in order to avoid an all out war.
His son Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) destroyed that same empire by trying to control without sharing. Again and again, Michael’s tactics are of someone who requires others to align to what he wants, or face dire consequences. This, regardless of their loyalty, their standing in the community, their bloodline or any other ramifications. Michael is quick to start an all out war between the families. This, of course, is one of many decisions that leads to his downfall.

As media companies struggle to find revenue growth and relevance in the digital world, I can’t help but thinking that there are lessons from The Godfather. Lessons that the music industry failed to recognize.

Again and again, record labels passed on opportunities, but attacked those who pursued them. They limited the ways consumers could engage with music, even as the world around them changed. As a surprising last-ditch effort, they sued fans. Not big time bootleggers, but individual fans. Instead of learning from these behaviors, they attacked the very people they needed most, the lifeblood of the music industry.

And today, the music business sits alone in the boathouse, reflecting on what could have been, had they only acted differently.

Media exists within an ecosystem, where the needs of many must be considered. That upstarts have a place in this world, and that if one institution chooses to fight them, then we all lose.

Book publishers are busy trying to figure out digital books, experimenting with digital-rights-management, trans-media, e-readers and the like. My fear is that this will become a winner-take-all scenario like the VHS and Beta battle a few decades back. (And that’s a shame, because Beta was such a better product, even though they lost the war.)

One interesting example, as usual, is Apple. They created entire economies around their products that encouraged new companies and new products to come into being. Their App Store is indicative of this – it is a new form of marketplace. Apple even designs their gadgets with tons of room for third-parties to develop accessories for them, such as iPhone cases. It’s as if Apple deliberately designs products that are easily scratched or shattered, and offers incredibly poor cases of their own, specifically so that third parties can offer “solutions” and inventive cases and accessories.

This doesn’t make Apple some kind of hippy, communal company. They are well known for their closed and controlling tactics.

I have no interest in trying to figure out who is Don Vito and who is Michael in the media world, and I don’t mean to make too much of The Godfather metaphor. It’s just a movie, and one based on a world where crime and murder is a common practice. 🙁

But, I do think it makes sense for media companies to better understand the interests, goals and behaviors of those in their entire ecosystem.

Thanks!

-Dan

The Safety – and Risk – of Following Trends

“It doesn’t follow the rules that other bottles do.” That is how my wife described the packaging for a dietary supplement that looked like it was made in Europe, or was from 1978.

In that instant, I considered how many brands follow the same trends, even though they are targeting the same customers and with essentially the same products. There is so much advice in the business world on how to stand out and break away from the pack, and yet it seems many businesses feel more secure failing together than succeeding alone.

Walk down any aisle in the food store. All the laundry detergent looks the same. All toothpaste looks the same. All cream cheese looks the same.

Sure, I’ve read studies about how customers have strict viewpoints about what a product is. For instance, why we are grossed out eating green or purple ketchup, but red ketchup is somehow tantalizing. That these products are supposed to support a persistent world-view, and become a source of security. That we buy cake mix in a box because it reminds us of childhood memories. That cake mix in a plastic spiral tube would likely challenge most of its target audience, and do poorly in sales.

And this is how the concept of “scale” poorly serves our culture – how the need to “go viral” and trying to be something for everyone creates markets filled with vanilla content and vanilla brands.

I especially consider this when looking at niche markets. That an author may not be happy to sell 20,000 books of her novel about vampires, because she did experience the mass success that Stephenie Meyer saw. That magazines are creating very expected iPad apps because they can’t take a chance to rethink the value that the deliver to their markets. EG: they must still sell “articles,” even though most media brands serve their audiences in a variety of other ways.

Why do most newspaper and magazine websites look exactly the same? Take a look at the websites for the top five newspapers in the US:

They all have similar navigation, tons of stories and similar use of photos. Do you know what their big innovative question seems to be? “Do we put up a paywall in front of our content?”

When everything looks the same, you can’t be blamed when you fail. I remember hearing an anecdote about why people chose to use IBM services over a smaller shop who might have better products, services, and support. The idea was: when you choose IBM, since they are known as world-class, that – if the project fails, you can’t be blamed because, you know, you went with IBM. So the responsibility is offloaded.

This is how trends persist even though we don’t realize it.

How come The New York Times’ website can’t look like TheOatmeal.com? Or Personified.com?

These questions challenge our own viewpoints as to what “normal” is, and how many mental contortions we will do to justify what is expected.

Yes, there is safety in following trends. But there is also risk. And you must ask yourself: what are you building that is unique in this world, that is adding incredible value? Do you want to be just another laundry detergent with red packaging? Is that your legacy?

Thanks!

-Dan

Physical Media vs Lifestyle Media

I’ve been preparing my home for the arrival of our first child in August. One step I’ve taken is to digitize a portion of my music collection, and put my CDs and records into storage.

I have collected music since I was a teenager, scouring record stores, looking for rare international editions, buying the same album in both vinyl and CD, and chatting with the store owners about when their next shipments are coming in. I loved everything about records, record stores, and fellow fans who were passionate enough to spend all of their time and money discovering the rarest of the rare.

In the past few weeks, as the records and CDs disappeared from my shelves, there is a sense of freedom in the newfound space. The music is still there, on hard drives, on subscription services such as Mog.com, on streaming radio stations, on my iPod. But the physical media is gone. What have I lost? What have I gained?

It’s interesting to consider that my child’s life will be filled with music, but they will rarely experience it as a physical object. They won’t pull a CD off the shelf, or mistakenly scratch one of my records. But there will likely always be music playing, because that’s just sort of how it is in our home. In fact, they won’t even be able to point to a stereo or entertainment center, our current “system” is a set of speakers that runs off of my iPhone.

I can’t help but feel that this transition away from physical media, has opened me up to LIFESTYLE MEDIA. That is, media that supports our experience of music, ideas, information, entertainment, and connection – instead of the collection of objects.

It took me a long time to embrace digital music. I had such an affinity for the objects of media, that I didn’t want to give them up. But that has changed. Likely, it will take me a long time to embrace digital books. The industry is still working out issues of digital-rights-management, platforms, pricing, and the like. I now realize that this change from print to digital adoption will come in time. I know more and more regular folks who are loving their digital book readers.

These transitions make me appreciate how my child will live in a world filled with media, even though he or she won’t be able to see it. That they may even experience it in a more pure form than I did growing up. What if I had spent more time in my teens LISTENING to music, instead of SHOPPING for it? What if I didn’t have to hunt down good books, but they simply popped into my life on my phone, iPad or e-reader? What if television is no longer defined by a device and a place, but as an experience? Sure, part of me is sentimental for what is lost. But more than anything, I must focus on what is GAINED. And the more I consider it, I realize we are gaining more than we are losing, and we can’t let sentimentality hold us back.

Thanks!

-Dan