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Internet Fame, Leaps of Faith, and the Truth from Guy

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Famous? Dirt Poor?

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In a recent conversation, a client made the following observation.

So many businesses seem confused about how to use the Internet. They appear to know their own product or service, but they don’t have clients or customers. They built it, and no one came. Has no one found the right model?

Some folks think the answer is to get famous. . . .

A strong personal brand and passion for your niche teamed is what makes a blog a powerful New Media marketing tool. That’s what will build trust, rapport, and reputation equity. Once you have those things, it’s a relatively straight forward process to turn those assets into profit. — Tribal Seduction

I’m with Tim Bourquin’s observations about that.

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people – people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

Internet famous isn’t “Oprah famous” . . . not even close . . . and the Internet forgets quickly.

When I asked Internet Rockstar, Guy Kawasaki, about what bloggers should know about blogging as business, he said.

The truth is that it’s very difficult to monetize a blog. I have a fairly popular one and sell less than $100,000 of advertising per year on it. It serves other purposes though for my activities as a venture capitalist, author, and speaker.

So to some extent, a blog can help with the overall branding and marketing of a company, but it’s a leap of faith.

A blog by itself isn’t a business. A product without customers won’t sell.

What do you see when you look at online businesses?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Are You Letting the Internet Think for You?

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Back Again to the Idea of Signal to Noise

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When I first got to the Internet, it was about finding out about blogging. I was intent upon writing and developing content. Then I became part of a community. Soon enough one community begot another, and another. I began to read and listen. The result was more information that this single person could process in a week. I was taking that much in everyday!

The subliminal messages were strong, loud, and constant. Be a producer! Have idea! Make things happen! Look at what everyone else is accomplishing!

I got to work having ideas and thinking about how I could change the world immediately!

I was at no loss for ideas, but somehow I managed to forget a basic principle I learned in publishing — anything worth doing requires a well-thought plan. Starting with fire and no plan often ends in a lot of smoke and nothing more.

I began to notice that a whole lot of a people with great ideas weren’t making any money.

Are You Letting the Internet Think for You?

I started a few projects with a few friends and I found out some truths about the Internet. Folks have ideas, but they don’t always think them through. I know.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend who has a thriving Internet business. Whenever he considers a change or a new product, he leaves the Internet for a week or two just to think. He was saying that the reason that he does this is because he doesn’t want to be like the guy in this story.

My friend changes his “business” every 9 months to a year. He just did it again. He left behind all that he had built in readership — just left them. He’s decided to follow another Internet guru. He built a new blog, dressed it all out, and then came to me to ask, “How do I make money with it?” What was he thinking?

What was he thinking? I suspect that he was letting the Internet think for him.

I repeat something I said earlier this week, “A blog isn’t a business any more than a building is a company.”

If you want to make money on the Internet, make sure you have three things crucial to any business.

  • Have a value proposition — a product or service that people want to buy
  • Have a plan — know how you’ll offer it and deliver it and how it will support you
  • Have a someone outside the thinking to work with you as you make decisions so that you stay on track

Thinking it through is harder when a barrage of signal to noise is always assaulting us. The noise from the Internet often repeats things that have nothing to do with good business practice.

How much time do you spend thinking your own thoughts about your business –questioning what the Internet says to do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Does Your Value Proposition Say that You're Small Time?

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Do You Want One Thing and Say Another?

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Last year I worked with a fabulous small business. They had spent many years doing the small jobs. Clients saw them as the ones to call when something needed fixing in quick order, but never seemed to call when something new needed to be conceived or designed. Their goal was to move from a “menu driven” production house to the agency status.

The business had the award-winning talent, had the proven expertise, had the elegant web presence, but the projects that came in were still small time. Their client base still saw them as something they had been long ago. Our goal was to change the way clients thought about them.

We looked at their value proposition. It was something like this:

We offer [our niche] a menu of highest quality services at reasonable prices.

It’s an invitation to buy small services according to price. It says “We do the small-time jobs.”

Does Your Value Proposition Say that You’re Small Time?

What do you do when you have big goals and you realize that your customer base sees you as a small-time operation? It’s time to realign your value proposition and how you offer your services to them.

Back to the fabulous small business I worked with last year: Now that we had identified the problem, we could move to a solution that made clients take a new look at what the business had to offer. We talked about the business they wanted to be and outlined this list of criteria.

  • Corporate level clients
  • Agency level and agency-level partnerships
  • Management of major projects not pieces

Using those we constructed a new value proposition that went something like this.

We offer [our niche] the thinking and expertise that moves your ideal customers to action.

We tweaked what they offered — took the itemized list off their web presence, changed how they talked about what they do — in text and in person, made sure the message was clear throughout the business and throughout their offers, and wrote a new tagline to reflect their new direction.

It was two weeks when they called to report a major client project and a possible agency partnership.

What’s your value proposition? Does it reflect your goals?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need to align your value proposition? Work with Liz!!

Related:
When Is Being Good Not Good for Business?
Decision or Choice: Is the Difference Stealing Your Focus and Your Time?
7 Ways to Carve a Path to the Future of Your Dreams

SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!