A couple of years ago, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. One of the results of reading the book and applying the GTD system is zero inbox. For I long time I thought zero inbox was a myth. But now, when I leave from the office every night, there are no emails, zero, in my business email account. Before applying the GTD system, I hated looking at my inbox because there were thousands of emails that all seemed to be screaming, read me! Now, I read, reply, archive (for referencing later) or delete emails efficiently. What’s your GTD story?
Category: business
When to sell and when to market
Often I hear people use the term “marketing” when they mean “sales” and vice versa. A Melbourne advertising professional succinctly defines the terms this way:
Marketing tells a story that spreads.
Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.
Link: The difference between marketing and sales
So, If your “marketing” campaign isn’t yielding the “sales” you projected, it’s probably because you need to rewrite your campaign story and retool your pitch.
Making its own app adds revenue for beleaguered newspaper
And the key words are:
…revenue from sources beyond the traditional core streams of ad sales and circulation…
Link: New York Times Offers IPhone, IPad App Platform to Other Publishers
It’s not news that daily newspapers are struggling to maintain profit margins with online competitors. The financially struggling Newsweek published a stat, in the recent July 26 issue, that in 2000 the U.S. had 1480 daily newspapers. By contrast, a decade late, there are 1302 daily newspapers.
Basically, AdAge reports that The New York Times has an app, Press Engine, that allows the:
publishers keep any advertising and circulation revenue the apps bring in; they pay the Times a one-time license fee for the platform and then a monthly maintenance fee.
And just when we thought the newspaper business was going the way of the slide rule. Silly us.
You want to earn money as a webcomic producer?
Then cut out the middle man. Apparently that is what Scott Kurtz, of the popular webcomic PvP. His reason for leaving Image Comics (notably the fourth largest comic publisher in America) and Diamond (the primary distributor of comics in the U. S.):
Sales through brick-and-mortar stores are declining and online sales are increasing…
Well, I could have told him that. Almost all the books I’ve helped authors publish have been released online exclusively.
Link: PvP Goes It Alone for Publishing, Leaves Diamond as Well
Business: Growth versus Innovation
Recently, I heard, or read, someone responding to the question of which is more important: growth or innovation. The person responded innovation, because innovation feeds growth and not the other way around. HBR provided the following points of innovation:
- population
- penetration
- price
- purchase
Link: The 4 Ps of Innovation
Getting things done: first define your goals
The simplest approach is not always the most effective. Seth Godin offers a Simple five step plan for just about everyone and everything. The operative word is “simple.” The one-size-fits-all approach may work for someone, but other situations are complicated with many variables. So, when you want to “make something happen,” try this:
- Define your goals.
- Determine a desired outcome.
Once those two actions are accomplished, prioritize tasks by:
- doing
- delegating
- deferring
- or deleting nonessential actions that don’t contribute to the defined goal and determined outcome.
More advice about GTD (getting things done) is available at GTD Times.
Publishers, present a reason to buy your artifact
“Consumers need powerful emotional & psychological reasons to buy your books rather than just grab the nearest free e-book,” says Audry Taylor, creative director of Go! Comi. Earlier this month, Robot 6 announced that Go! Comi closed shop “due to a combination of economic downturn and digital theft.” In a recent article she offers five suggestions for publishers who want to avoid going out of business due to digital piracy:
- Make a story available world-wide simultaneously in all major languages.
- In a digital format.
- With perks for pre-orders.
- And goodies that digital pirates can’t reproduce. (And yes, that’s possible. Goodies they can’t compete with, like author chats.)
- Rip off business model 4 pirate sites & one-up them. They offer a Wii raffle for a subscription to a d/l site, u offer author-signed Wii
Though this is written primarily for a manga/comic publishing audience, I think this is good advice for any book publisher.
I’ve said this before, but books need to be designed in way that compels consumers to buy a souvenir, dead-tree product (maybe in a decade a book will be called an artifact). In light of Audry Taylor’s comments, I plan to amend that note to encompass a broader reach than well-designed, dead-tree products. She continues by saying, “My dream pub company is multimedia + print + Etsy + Cafepress + Goodreads + Facebook + fan community.” I agree. The more you compel readers/content users to make emotional and psychological investments in your content, the better the relationship your brand will have with your loyal followers (dare I say, your brand’s evangelists?).
Want to Monetize the Web?
To monetize content requires a shift in thinking because one must move from sticking with the traditional push business model to accepting the web’s “pull” approach…. (via adage)
adage offers three ‘pull’ approaches:
- Use content to attract audiences
- Create a community to coalesce audiences
- Leverage the power of your community to drive revenue
Luxury vs. premium
fluffynotes:1
Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. They say, “I can afford to spend money without regard for intrinsic value.”
That doesn’t mean they are senseless expenditures. Sending a signal is valuable if that signal is important to you.
Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more. Figure skates made from kangaroo hide, for example, are premium. The spectators don’t know what they’re made out of, but some skaters believe they get better performance. They’re happy to pay more because they believe they get more.
NOTES:
1) fluffynotes, June 2009, fluffynotes.tumblr.com, accessed June 23, 2009, http://fluffynotes.tumblr.com/post/115174039/luxury-vs-premium (page no longer available, web site deactivated)
Marketing tells a story
Marketing tells a story that spreads.
Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.
If you don’t pay the salesforce (because you go direct, or you go free), then who is going to do that for you? The only answer that occurs to me is, “your users/fans/customers.”
This means that a critical element of any strategy that ditches the salesforce is to figure out how you will empower and encourage your customers to take their place. Easier said than done.
(fluffynotes)1
NOTES:
1) fluffynotes, June 2009, fluffynotes.tumblr.com, accessed June 23, 2009, http://fluffynotes.tumblr.com/post/115170667/the-difference-between-marketing-and-sales
(page no longer available, web site deactivated)
// ambiance, automation & emergence (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/three_models_of_value_in_the_real_time_web.php)… discuss…
According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008.
// you’re a coworker, not my friend. happy friday…
Blogs survive as scavengers
News-gathering is expensive. (Read previous posts on this theme here (The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)) and here (Pornographers don’t sell pornography).) That’s why I present this from Simon Dumenco for AdAge.com:
“unlike Salon, which… pays for its content, HuffPo [HuffingtonPost] has an ethically questionable content-generation scheme: It doesn’t pay most of its bloggers at all. Worse, it sometimes even lifts content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content…” (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=133541)
Seth on the death of the personal blog
From BlogAsheville:
Many local bloggers have neglected their blogs recently, with varying reasons/excuses.
So, do bloggers need a bailout too? No. Read Seth’s take on the personal blog demise:
There’s a difference between a blog about YOU… and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.
I guess there’s an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)
So, enough about me. How about you?
The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.
The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)
AdAge.com opens an article with these dismal facts:
Newspaper ad revenue fell almost $2 billion in the third quarter for a record 18.1% decline, according to new statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. What’s worse, newspapers’ online ad revenue fell for the second quarter in a row.
In another, companion article titled “Huffington Post More Valuable Than Some Newspaper Cos.,” AdAge.com offers this regarding blog value versus newspaper value:
The [$100 million] funding means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies…
The irony is that The Huffington Post “rarely provide original content” (to quote myself) but “select and repackage… information.”
In a CJR piece by Robert Kuttner with an urgent deck that reads “Newspapers have a bright future as print-digital hybrids after all — but they’d better hurry,” he writes of an interview with a 21-year old colleague. In their conversation he attempts to establish an argument in defense of the printed newspaper. Mr. Kuttner writes:
By now I was feeling very last century. And then Ezra… handed me a trump. You have one thing right, he volunteered. The best material on the Internet consistently comes from Web sites run by print organizations.
My take away is this:
- Newspapers that don’t adapt to the print-digital hybrid should go the way of the buffalo.
- Newspapers that embrace the print-digital hybrid should do so quickly and reorganize as a news organization using the full depth of the new media platform. After all, newspapers are content providers who have been relying on a single (print) platform too long.
- The Huffington Post is funded. In a little known interview, the publisher of World magazine made the following statement:
As public companies that do most of the news-gathering cut back on their investments… We see an opportunity to increase news resources in the non-profit world. We may be looking at a paradigm shift in this industry from for-profit news-gathering to non-profit news-gathering.
You’re kidding, right? Magazine ad sales increase?
Ad pages in the monthly magazines’ January through September issues had fallen 7.4% from 2007, according to Media Industry Newsletter. The first nine months of 2007, by comparison, slipped only 1% from 2006. Before that, we’d seen a few years of gains.
Okay, so maybe it is not all bad.
The Economist… presented a crisp example of excellence in editorial, ad sales, circulation and marketing. Women’s Health continued its ascent…. Every Day With Rachael Ray even reversed the newsstand decline of first-half 2007.
Down the road
Seth Godin writes:
“The best time to look for a job next year is right now.”
The best advice I received years ago by an old radio disc jockey was—always think two or three jobs down the road. It changes your perspective on what you are doing currently.
“Better content from trusted sources”
Just because a cell phone can shoot video doesn’t mean the person operating the device has the faintest clue about building an audience.
David Burn of AdPulp on Link
Weekend review
Another reason not to visit Disney: Fingertip biometrics at Disney turnstiles
Open society: largest data breaches
If it looks like a moleskine: “stylish little pocket notebook”
And finally, from Seth Godin:
“So, there’s plenty of bad economic news floating around. From the price of oil to Wall Street to bailouts to the death of traditional advertising.
Which is great news for anyone hoping to grow or to make an impact.”
Quote: Persistence is having the same goal over and over
Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.
Persistence is having the same goal over and over.
Seth Godin. Link.
Pornographers don’t sell pornography
AdPulp provides this:
“42.7% of consumer time online is spent with content sites, 28.6% is with communication sites, 16.1% with commerce sites and 5% on search sites.” Link
(For more detailed analysis visit OPA Link)
While a lot of content provider sites (i.e. news and entertainment sites) feel pressure to offer their content for free (and some have already removed their firewalls—i.e. TNYT and WSJ) the question remains—how does an organization provide “free” content without going bankrupt?
Jake McKee’s post—You’re selling the wrong thing—sited the McGuire HuffingtonPost Porn Knows What It’s For—Do You? as an answer to that question. To excerpt some notable quote from McGuire’s article:
“Pornographers… don’t seem to care much about how they do it—they’ll just find ways to give people the orgasms however people want them given… magazines… online photos, online videos… why are newspapers… having such a hard time?… they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do.
“The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information…”
And here’s a necessary mainstream-media-sucks, blogs-rule rant from McGuire:
“Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it—because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant.”
McGuire misses the point in the steam of his own blog-rant.
Blogs survive as scavengers of info. Blogs select and repackage recycled information. Blogs—with the exception of maybe 50 techno-intelligentsia sites—rarely provide original content. The mainstream media behemoths still provide the bulk of online content. Here’s were McGuire is correct: pornographers don’t care about how or by what vehicle they deliver the content—online or offline. Pornographers bank on three basic actions: consumption, evangelism, purchase (and repeat).
Or to put it another way: “delivering anticipated, personal and relevant [content] to people who actually want” it. (Source). Do people still consume news? Yes. Do the majority of people want to pay for it? No. How does a news/entertainment organization earn revenue online? IMHO, online advertising + products = revenue. Translation: offer ad rates (dictated by web traffic) plus and an online store with shopping cart for souvenirs related to the content the consumers want.
Targeting your book’s demographic? Or manufacturing your book’s audience?
Positioning one’s book in an already cluttered publishing arena is essential. Niching-down is another way of targeting a reader audience. Consider horror novels with all the sub genres: macabre, goth, post-apocalyptic, mystery, Victorian, etc. Authors and agents understand that before a manuscript is finished it needs to fit a market. Genre-defying books tend to be a challenge to position and are often avoided by major publishers. Is it a mystery or romance or high literature?
Cory Doctorow appears to either be a happy capitalist or a guerrilla marketeer by taking advantage of his online prominence (secure, soft market) and publishing leverage (200-copy give-aways are not cheap if one considers obscene postal rates) to penetrate a teen reader market.
“Since this book is intended for high-school-age kids, my publisher has agreed to send 200 advance review copies of the book to school newspaper reviewers, along with the same press-kit… (actually, the school kit has even more stuff — it also includes a signed personal letter explaining why I wrote this book and why I hope kids will read it).” (via Boing Boing) Link
Strategically this is a smart move—even for smaller, independent publishers. The best marketing device is the actual product. However, I wonder if offering a free downloadable preview—or entire book—would be more effective. Why bother with book reviewers? The actually end-user, the reader, is the one who will purchase the product—not the high school book reviewer.
Coffeehouse Junkie 