Category: Internet

DESIGN FOR CUSTOMERS

Goodbye “blogs as media empires.” The signal to noise ratio is too high, and the buckshot approach (more content = more page views) is doomed to fail. You can only carry so much coal on the locomotive of “content is king.”

And the idea that an app or HTML5 or social media is going to save your media outlet or business is wrong. If you don’t have customers you are doomed. A coffee shop can’t stay open if people just come in for the smell everyday; it must sell a cup of coffee on occasion.

You need to read ‘Don’t “design for mobile”, design for your customer relationship.’ If you don’t have people who will actually buy something from you, you can’t last.

Do you think companies are going to keep throwing money at media outlets that aren’t bringing clicks and engagement?

This was dug up from the Wayback Machine here.

NOTHING IS NEWS

I remember December 29th, 2009. I was checking email around 12:30am while laying down to sleep when I got the news that Avenged Sevenfold Drummer James’The Rev’ Sullivan passed away. A few emails later we had a post up at 1:15am.

This year, on Christmas Eve, I saw some Tweets that Netflix was down. That meant some editors and bloggers had to mobilize. A post had to be written! Hurry!

Dec 24, 11:06pm – Netflix Hit by Outage, Blames Amazon
Dec 24, 9:46pm – Amazon AWS Takes Down Netflix On Christmas Eve

The same happens with my celeb / pop writer friends during the holidays, hoping that no movie stars get caught kissing someone that ain’t their significant other.

In 2009 this worked. It works today, late in 2012. But it can’t continue. There’s too much. When everything is a story, nothing is a story.

MONETIZE YOUR BLOG

My friend Lisette Voytko landed on Reddit, a popular user-generated site of interesting & newsy links. With the expected spike in traffic, I replied, “monetize!” Meaning, turn that traffic to your blog into cold hard cash! But then she called me out and asked, “how?”

Well, here’s a few ways I’ve monetized my blog(s) over the last few years.

SELL SOMETHING
I’ve sold stuff on my site and people have bought it. I’ve sold hand-drawn robots at my Willed From Wires Robot Shop, and I’ve got two ebooks detailing my bike adventures from the past year and a half. Skip the affiliate links on Amazon – create something of your own – something you can stand behind – and put a price tag on it.

GET SOMETHING
I’m not so huge that I can just sell stuff everyday, but I could sure use extra storage space on DropBox! So I wrote a post about how awesome DropBox is, and encourage readers to sign up for an account, which gets me more storage space.

SHOW SOMETHING
When I was writing on The Bike Nerd during my daily bicycle adventures around the US, it showed something; I can write about bikes. It’s not about “lots of traffic,” it’s about the “right traffic,” and that’s how I got a paid writing gig for a bike shop in NYC. Write to your audience, not a “general audience,” and see what happens. The hard part? Figuring out who your audience is.

PLAN SOMETHING
Okay, so you don’t have anything to sell today, and maybe cloud storage isn’t your thing. But you just know that someday you’ll have something that people will love. Well, make sure you have a “subscribe to my email list” box somewhere on your site. If you don’t have anything to sell today, maybe you will two months from now. The best time to start that is 10 years ago, but the next best time is now (hat tip to Gary Vaynerchuk for that one).

Monetizing your blog isn’t just ad networks or e-commerce, it’s about opportunities that come your way just by writing great content day after day, year after year. I did Buzzgrinder for six years before I got my foot in the door at AOL, and then it was another year and a half before I started Noisecreep for AOL Music.

HOMEWORK: What’s the one thing you just KNOW? It doesn’t even have to be an internet skill. Maybe you work on motorcycles, or you have experience finding great places to fish, or maybe you took over your parents business. Trust me – there’s an audience for all of those things on the internet. If you want to be a pop-culture super blogger, well, good luck with that. But if you want to be the #1 Google search result for “how to take over my parents bakery,” or “where to camp in Utah,” well, I bet you can own that audience.

So, who is your audience?

DON’T SAY “FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!” IF YOU DON’T USE TWITTER

If your business wants to abandon Twitter, that’s your choice. But maybe you should remove the cute “Follow us on Twitter!” messages from your ads in the local alt-weekly’s.

Recently, just for the heck of it, I figured I’d look up a local business on Twitter from an ad and saw this – updated 238 days ago.

This reminds me of Van Halen’s “brown M&M” clause, about removing all the brown M&M’s from the bowl of candy backstage. If they showed up at a gig and saw brown M&M’s, well, that meant their rider wasn’t read very throughly. If the promoter shrugs off the M&M part, what else could they have skipped? The safety measures? The power requirements?

It’s not being pompous, it’s paying attention to the details.

If a business shrugs off social media thing like this (thinking perhaps,”it doesn’t matter, no one will notice!”), that’s your choice. But it’s my choice to consider what other details you’re skipping over.

CAN I EMAIL YOU THIS LARGE FILE?

No, you can not. If you’re sending photos, audio files, video or anything else that is creeping over the 5MB mark, please, step away from your inbox, go to Dropbox, and open an account.

Once you’re set up, you’ll have 2GB of storage “in the cloud,” meaning, it’s not on your computer, it’s just somewhere else.

Some other uses for Dropbox:
Upload your vacation photos and share the link with family members.
Musicians, send your rough mixes to your band mates.
Bike nerds, upload PDF bike maps of cities you’ve ridden in.
Upload your most recent resume so you can access it from your crappy job.

Once you have your file uploaded, you can then share it with someone. Read “How do I link to files in my Dropbox?” and you’ll be slinging files in no time.

Install the Dropbox App on your iPhone and you’ll be able to shuffle documents around when you’re out of the office getting coffee.

You might even get a raise.