Crush It! (9 page)

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p until now you’ve been focusing on building your brand by creating killer content and getting that content some traction by building your community one e-mail, one comment, one tweet, one status update at a time. Once you feel you’ve grown to a point where your brand is sticky and your audience has made your content a regular, even necessary, part of their community and their online experience, you can start to actively create revenue streams. Unlike in the beginning, when you threw out a big net into a big pond to capture in as many members of the social media school of fish as possible, you’re now going to drop in your line to a variety of smaller ponds. Be patient. In time, if you continue to hustle, you’ll grow your presence and improve your skills to the point where the fish—really, really big fish—will be jumping straight into your hands.

Some revenue ponds to consider include the following.

advertising

A lot has been made of the fact that magazines and newspapers are being crippled because companies are pulling their ads to save money during this recession. Well, of course they are; the cost of radio, magazine, and newspaper advertising space is not in line with the returns in today’s world. But companies need to sell if they’re going to stay alive, which means that even if their budgets are somewhat smaller than they used to be, they have to spend money to remind consumers they exist. If they want to sell a product, they have to advertise. The difference now is that they’re not going to waste their money by throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue out there that need a place to go, and they’re winding up online because it’s the best return on investment advertisers can find. Remember, where people—consumers—go, money follows, and the people are spending more and more time in the blogosphere. If there’s an active, energetic, passionate community spending time on your blog, there is no reason on Earth why advertisers wouldn’t want to spend a portion of all that ad revenue there, too.

For example, you’re Sally Gardener from upstate New York. You’ve decided to monetize your passion—vegetable gardens. You’ve left comments and started conversations with thousands of other avid gardeners and gained some traction as the most expert and entertaining vegetable gardener online. You’re good. Really good. People who couldn’t tell the difference between a sprig of parsley and cilantro have come to your site to watch the
episode where you use a water pistol to defend your last tomato from a hungry squirrel, only to lose the tomato to his partner in crime lurking behind you in the shadows.

Your first instinct when thinking of ways to bring dollars to your site might be to sign up for something like Google AdSense, which allows you to post Google advertisements related to your topic. I’m not a big fan of these because it distracts from your content and makes your page look cheap and cluttered. It also doesn’t pay that well. I’m disappointed that so many good bloggers have become dependent on it—there are far more creative avenues to pursue.

Here’s a better idea: #1—classy banner ads (à la decknet-work.net), which appear at the top or bottom of your site (don’t overdo it!). #2—Go to Google.com, search your subject matter, and check every blog and website to see which companies pay for Google AdSense ads to be posted. Cold-call every relevant company that is buying space on Google AdSense—they’re already spending the ad money on the Web, why not spend it on you? You can find a video on this topic on GaryVaynerchuk.com: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/search/cold+call.

speaking engagements

Next, start taking steps to get on the lecture circuit. Have you any idea how many gardening conferences and flower shows go on every week in this country? Come up with an original theme or topic, call the show’s coordinators, and offer to give a talk for free. What does that get you? The same social equity as you get with your fantastic online content. It gives you a chance to (a)
talk about what you love, (b) build cred, and (c) do it in front of an interested audience, one of whom might be the coordinator for another conference or garden show and who, after seeing you talk, might be compelled to pay you to speak at their venue. As for the conference where you just offered up your services for free, it may take five or six times, but if you’re any good at what you do, your audience will start expecting you to appear at these events, and the conference will eventually be willing, even happy, to pay you. It might take a while to get to that point, but you’re patient. Right?

affiliate programs

You could also consider doing an affiliate program. This is where you put a link on your site to another site that sells garden products, for example, and if someone clicks through and buys, you get a commission. This can make you some sweet cash. Think about it—a 20 percent commission of a $3,000 prefab greenhouse is $600. And what did you have to do to earn it? Not a whole lot. A good resource for affiliate marketing programs is Commission Junction. Amazon, too, has an extremely popular affiliate program, and there are many others. Just do a Google search for “affiliate programs” to find them.

One way I’d love to see more people create revenue is to create their own affiliate deal with another local business. Sally Gardener could call a local nursery and hook up a deal where she gets 10 percent of every click-through and sale to their website from her blog. For those of you who worry that this seems like selling out or mercenary, you shouldn’t put anything on your blog that you don’t believe in. Therefore, you’re not going to do an affiliate with a company whose product you wouldn’t buy yourself. In fact, one way to defuse any criticism for allowing ads or affiliate links onto your blog is to include an explanation on your site as to why you’re willing to support these particular companies. If you’re honest about why you believe in the product and why you’ve decided to allow selling opportunities on your blog, most people won’t be put off. Besides, society is getting used to product placement in movies and television; I expect we’ll be seeing more of it in all forms of media.

retail

Develop a product to sell, such as great gardening gloves, decorative objects, soaps, mosquito repellant, whatever you love and think you can do better than anyone else. Even more fun, sell schwag. Create a T-shirt for five bucks and sell it for ten. If you’ve got ten thousand readers or viewers, and maybe a thousand buy it, that’s five grand, and it cost you almost nothing to produce. Plus, now you’ve got people wearing or using or displaying something with your blog name and address, giving you free marketing and word of mouth.

articles

Hit up online and print magazines and other blogs about contributing articles. If they aren’t interested in paying you, offer to reciprocate by mentioning them on your blog. Approach food-and-nutrition nonprofits about writing for their newsletters. Talk to your local farmer’s market about contributing to their publication or blog if they don’t already have one.

seminars

Invite people to come out and garden with you and give them a chance to ask questions. Your first lessons will go for a relatively low rate, but as word gets around that you’re good and that people are seeing results in their gardens after working with you, your rates can go up. Make it an event to broaden your appeal—team up with a local chef who is also building a personal brand. Once the gardening portion of the day is done, everyone joins together to cook a terrific vegetarian lunch. Invite someone from the local food bank to give a talk about how and where people can donate food they grow in their gardens. Coordinate field trips for local schools to come spend their morning with you.

books and tv

It’s almost a cliché to remind you that good blogging can lead to book deals. From tackling every recipe in the first volume of
Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
to a satirical list of Stuff White People Like or a collection of photographs of crazy, gross food (This Is Why You’re Fat), blogs have long been a hot commodity in the publishing world and have proven their potential as bestsellers. Video blogs, too, have led to TV opportunities. Amanda Congdon, who got her start video blogging and hosting Rocketboom, has appeared on many TV shows (for a while she had a deal with ABC and HBO though it looks like that didn’t work out); Perez Hilton, celebrity blogger, had his own reality show and continues to appear on TV. Andy Samberg was a cult Internet hit with his comedy troupe Lonely Planet before becoming a star of
Saturday Night Live.

consulting

As your audience grows and your blog starts to get real attention in the form of media coverage, ad revenue, and requests for speaking at functions, expect to start getting requests for tips and advice from many other gardening bloggers. At first you’ll want to offer your time for free, but if you’re sitting on a heavy knowledge base, you should eventually start to charge for your time. If you come across as legit and honest, people will respond favorably, especially since you have now “lived it.”

advertising redux

Anyone who is able to build a gardening show with ten thousand viewers is perfectly justified in reaching out to the big boys. All you have to do is buy a stack of gardening magazines, flip through the pages to see who advertises, and then Twitter or Facebook status out, “Hey, BMW, why are you spending fifty grand
on a full-page ad in
Home and Garden
and getting little return on your investment when you could place something with me for just a couple of g’s and get crazy ROI?”

create some hoopla

There’s one more thing you can do, but it takes a very particular kind of DNA to pull it off. Launch your site. Put out a few days’ worth of killer content. Pick up the phone and call big corporate advertising agencies and tell them what you’ve just done. Explain to them how your expertise and your passion are going to make this thing huge. Tell them you’re giving them an incredible chance to buy out the show for the next year while you’re still unknown. In a year you’ll be able to sell space for three grand an episode, but since you need the money now you’re looking for someone to invest and grow with you. Show support today, and you’ll repay them with undying loyalty through the course of your career.

Sounds outrageous? I’m telling you, that play is in play somewhere. Ten people reading this book will be able to pull it off. When you do, let me know at [email protected].

As you can see, there is lots of money to be made, albeit in dribs and drabs to begin, by siphoning off money from already-existing sources.

Some ponds I’ve mentioned are shallower than others and might not give you the kind of return you dream about right away—fifty bucks here, three hundred there. But how much is your blog earning you now? Nothing? And you’re going to turn away fifty bucks?

Say it with me: Anything is better than zero.

That doesn’t mean you should do anything to earn a buck, but neither should you walk away from dollars if you don’t have any. Too many people think they’re big shots when they’re nothing in the grand scheme of things. Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid, it will negatively impact your business decisions. Even if your ambitions are huge, start slow, start small, build gradually, build smart. The money will be there, and more important, so will the opportunities.

Y
ou know I like contradiction, so it shouldn’t surprise you that one of the most important concepts I want you to keep in mind is diametrically opposed to some of the ideas I’ve shared with you until now.

I’ve repeated over and over that in order to build a winning business you have to go whole hog with your passion. True. I’ve said that if you don’t plan ahead and decide exactly what you want and where you want to see your business end up, you’re broken. Still true. But what is also true is that as committed and obsessed and goal oriented as entrepreneurs need to be, they also have to be willing to practice what I call “reactionary business,” which at heart is about being willing and able to adapt and change. This is where most companies and businesspeople lose the game, by refusing to admit their mistakes or neglecting to look ahead to see what could negatively impact their business. Nothing in life ever goes exactly the way you think it will,
and that goes for all of your carefully planned entrepreneurial dreams and goals. Reactionary business allows you to make a couple of crucial moves when the landscape starts to change.

be ready to adapt

You’d be surprised at how many entrepreneurs aren’t good at adjusting to changing environments, and it’s a major reason why so many businesses don’t achieve their full potential. I see it all the time. Someone with ambition and talent decides she’s going to be the Martha Stewart of kid-friendly sandwiches, and then all of a sudden discovers that somewhere along the way she reached a core group of beer-drinking dudes who are religiously watching the show. Instead of embracing that demographic and adapting, she refuses to acknowledge it and keeps making fish-shaped pimento cheese. Maybe she does fine with her blog catering to the kiddie set, but can you imagine how much bigger this ambitious person’s business could have been if she had given up a day a week to prepare sandwiches perfect for tailgate parties?

A perfect real-life example of a brand that drew an unnecessary line in the sand regarding its positioning is Cristal. Starting in the late 1990s, the upscale Champagne was enthusiastically adopted by the hip-hop community. But instead of embracing and leveraging the attention, the managing director indicated in an interview with the
Economist
that he’d prefer to distance his brand from rappers and their fans, saying, “We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.” He had the chance to cultivate a golden opportunity to capture major market share and instead
he killed it, because smart and influential entertainers like Jay-Z were rightfully offended by the guy’s attitude and organized an effective boycott against the brand.

put out fires

Now, reactionary business has nothing to do with social media—everyone in business should practice it even if they’ve decided to completely ignore social networks (a stupid idea but one that a lot of established brands are following). On the other hand, all of these social networking platforms turbo-boost your ability to be reactionary, not only by enabling you to guide your brand to where it naturally fits or where you discover pockets of interest, but by giving you a lot of power to put out fires. For example, I was seen all over ESPN after the NFL draft booing the Mark Sanchez pick by the New York Jets. It looked like I was hating on the pick and the player, which wasn’t true. I didn’t know the details of the trade and when I saw the team go from seventeen to five in the rankings, I assumed that the Jets had given up a whole lot to get Sanchez, and that’s what was bothering me. Turns out that wasn’t the case. Regardless, I felt bad that everyone, including Mark Sanchez if he happened to be watching, misunderstood my reaction. Five years ago I couldn’t have fixed the misperception, but thanks to social media, the Monday after the game I was able to use my biggest platform, Wine Library TV, to clarify what I thought.

A more relevant example can be found in the way Domino’s used YouTube to respond to the negative publicity they suffered after two employees shot video of themselves doing
disgusting things with the food before serving it to customers. A lot of people pointed to that story as evidence of the downside to social media because two idiots were able to blast a negative image of a company out to thousands of consumers within minutes. But the Domino’s brand didn’t get hurt. Anyone with half a brain knows that morons work everywhere and that this could happen in any restaurant, from fast food to reservations only. No one wants people messing with their food, and of course the employees responsible should be punished, but their actions didn’t hurt the brand. In fact, I think Domino’s helped their brand by showing great reactionary business instincts. I respect how fast they got into the trenches and responded via the same medium as the crime that was committed, with a YouTube video. Good for CEO Patrick Doyle, who in his address appears to be a pretty traditional corporate guy gamely trying to fight fire with fire (next time, Mr. Doyle, try to look into the camera and lose the script; it makes a big difference). CEOs and business managers don’t need to have a power meeting with their PR department to discuss how to handle a problem like this one; they should know what they want to say, and then say it. Successfully dealing with a situation like this is all about speed, honesty, and transparency.

I saw this as a great opportunity for Domino’s to flip this situation on its head. They, and every other fast-food restaurant, should open up their kitchens to a livestream that anyone can watch from anywhere, including while waiting in line to order pizza. To me, adapting in this way to the reality that cell phones and Flip Cams (which are going to merge, wait and see) are
always going to make their way behind the scenes of any restaurant would be an outstanding example of reactionary business.

shape your story

Thanks to social networking platforms, your story is going to get told, unfiltered, whether you like it or not. You can no longer control the message, but that’s not a bad thing unless you work for a closed-minded PR company. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest hurdle for most corporate brands today is their dependence on their PR people. They’re terrified of the unfiltered message, but what they should do is encourage it. Every employee of every company should have a Facebook account where they can talk about their work and the company (in addition to whatever else they want). Let people gripe, let them air their frustrations. Don’t wait for exit interviews to find out what your staff really thinks; tap into the pulse of the company and start making changes right away. Yes, there are websites dedicated to allowing people to air their dirty laundry, but people should be allowed to hang their dirty laundry on their own clothesline. Empowering your employees to communicate is a great thing. If you suppress their urge to talk, you’re only weakening your brand from within by limiting your access to information.

When you know what people are saying and thinking about your brand, you can address it. If you see falsehood, you can correct it. If you see praise, you can show appreciation. If you see confusion, you can inform. Your empowerment doesn’t stop with your staff or your customers, either. It used to be that you were at the mercy of the media, with no say in how it told your story
unless it was willing to pick up on your version. If you didn’t like the picture it painted, you were kind of stuck. Now you can fight the media itself with these tools, with your blog and Facebook and Twitter. Now you can do a live press conference on Ustream, whereas ten years ago you could try but it was always a gamble whether someone would show up with a TV camera.

trendspotting

Some entrepreneurs are really into creating the next big thing. Not me. I’m about identifying the next big thing and jumping all over it. To me, honing your ability to act on waxing and waning social and cultural trends is a major reactionary business move.

Some people are born with good trendspotting intuition. My whole life I’ve been able to see something and just feel that it’s going to be big. I felt it for baseball cards, for toy collectibles, for wine, for the Internet and video blogging, and I’m sure I’ll see the next trend that comes around. I look everywhere for inspiration. Recently I noticed that certain kids are using markers to draw tattoos on themselves and create body graffiti. Occasionally I’ve used my forty-five-minute drive to work to wonder, what does it mean that kids are drawing their own tattoos? How do I capitalize on it? Where is the opportunity? Then while on the Thunder Cruise (a cruise for my fans) in April, we docked in the Bahamas and I noticed a huge line at the kids’ tattoo station at the Atlantis. If I were in the ink business, I’d want to create an organic, nontoxic, kid-friendly, skin-friendly brand of ink and capture the market of kids who want to design their own tattoos. The tremendous line at the booth told me that parents are clearly
ready for this. I’m not the right guy to invent the product to fill that market need, but if you do it, let me know.

Being reactionary means that you’re always thinking about the meaning behind cultural change. Let’s say you’re at a party and a friend tells you she’s canceling cable. You hear that and your radar should go off. Canceling cable? No one would have canceled cable two years ago, what’s going on? If you haven’t figured it out already, I’ll tell you why it’s important: it means that the day is almost here when there will be no difference between watching TV and watching online video. Cable on Demand and Netflix and TiVo and YouTube and Hulu have each pushed the envelope a little farther by extending the life of movies and shows and by making network programming schedules irrelevant, but the next phase will be even more dramatic. Eventually Comcast or Time Warner is going to announce a new channel that airs online videos. You’ll be able to use your remote to search by subject. Now the kid who draws tattoos on his arm will be able to type in “body graffiti” and find forty-five different shows about body art on the Internet. He’s going to create his own TV watching experience, not just swallow what the TV stations have decided to feed him. If you happen to host a graffiti video blog that at first was reaching five thousand people, you’re suddenly going to have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands. For someone practicing reactionary business—someone who is looking ahead and adapting to markets and taking advantage of new opportunities to communicate—that puts a lot of media dollars into play.

Thanks to social networking we now have access to powerful, real-time, streamlined data that can allow us to steer our ships
very accurately in response to trends and to turn challenges into huge opportunities. But reactionary business isn’t limited to businesses developed through social media platforms. Whatever the next business phenomenon turns out to be, your reactionary business skills will be critical to capitalizing on it.