by Sapphire (May 6, 2008)
There’s a truism I’ve noticed throughout my observations of the business world, and it applies to every industry - movies, real estate, medicine, all of it: hype can take you to dizzying heights, but the air’s much richer where the quality is.
Transactions are both Vulcan and Human.
Business transactions have two components: the quality of the results, and the way the transaction makes you feel. These two don’t always have a lot to do with each other. Some people can make you feel very good while they’re screwing you over, or fail to make you feel particularly good when they’re actually doing great work for you. More people are attuned to the emotional part of the transaction than the logical part where they ask themselves, “Wait a second - THIS is all I’m getting out of this?” That’s critical thinking at work. Everyone’s born with emotions, but critical thinking takes learning and some people never get there.
If you’re the one selling something, your monetary success can come from actually being good (”Wow, that doctor may be gruff, but he saved my friend when all the experts gave her two months to live!”) or it can come from hype (launching a huge ad campaign that says, “Steve Jones - best doctor in town! He’ll fix you right up and give you a lollipop free of charge!”). People fall for hype partly because they don’t know the person’s job well enough to tell if she knows what she’s doing, and partly because they’re responding to the immediate gratification of being made to feel special (”Yay, I go to the best doctor in town, Steve Jones! I know he’s the best, I saw it on the side of a bus!”). For that reason, charmers who hype themselves will always have a big audience.
But hype is a pedestal. You climb onto it by networking and getting yourself press exposure, and by promoting “specials” such as discounts, freebies and loss-leaders. Hype always makes the big money in the short term because it appeals to people’s emotions. The problem is, there’s always someone right behind you waiting to emotionally gratify your customer base right out from under you. It’s like dating, except at no point do you even have the illusion this customer will stay with you until death do you part. You have to make customers feel special every day and never let them forget you, and how do you do that?
At the end of the day, hype will have more customers and maybe make more money, but quality will generate more profit - more ROI on your work.
If you’re hype based, you have to continually expend energy and/or money promoting yourself (or your website or your product), sucking up to people, responding to people. You generally have to keep your prices low because - unless you have exceptional, Hollywood star level public relations, which ain’t cheap - having low prices is part of how you will make your potential customers feel happy about the transaction. That is one of the things emotional customers always seek - low price, high ROI. If that’s your customer base, you will forever be at their mercy and at the mercy of the people above you who can make or break your rep.
You also have to jump the instant the competition gets an edge. You can’t be five seconds late out the gate, or they’ll steal your edge and you might never get it back. No days off for you! You have to expend crazy amounts of time and energy defending yourself whenever accusations of incompetence or mediocrity arise. These are always tricky, stressful periods - will the choir to whom you preach stay loyal? Or will they get some instant emotional gratification from the next appealing message and leave you in the dust? It’s a never-ending battle for the audience. You have to win them every day.
Quality only has to win them once. If you’re quality based, it can be really frustrating waiting for people to find you and tell their friends. A lot of your crowd won’t have friends to tell because they’re not great networkers themselves. But while you might never make as much money or have as many readers as a site that buys its readers through hype, you and your visitors will get what you both want out of your quality site - you’ll have the income and type of work you want to do, and they’ll have whatever they needed that you delivered. Once they find you, they won’t forget you because it’s not in their best interest to.
Sites that rely on hype will always get the customers first because there’s always a new crop of young and naive people, totally emotion-based, finding them (why do you think marketers target the young?). But as people mature, they realize the best-feeling transactions are the ones that give them good results, and that’s when they find sites/businesses that offer real quality.
Some marketers like the challenge of being all hype. They love the excitement of the political maneuvers and the constant need to manipulate. If you don’t love those things, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is it’ll take you longer to reach where you want to be. The good news is, once you get there you’ll have more time to turn off your cellphone and take a nap. You’ll be on solid ground instead of a pedestal someone can knock you off of.
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by Sapphire (May 2, 2008)
April was a big improvement for me over the past few months. In March, I realized I was killing my earnings by trying to upgrade all my sites to be way above spamminess. I don’t consider any of my sites “spam” per se - I don’t just optimize them for search engines. But the fact is, sites full of good but not particularly unique content can bring in some very decent profit. I called them “chaff sites” and set them all up with followable text link ads (from and LinkWorth) and - yes - AdSense.
It may be a short term earnings plan, but this is how a lot of people who’ve only been at this for a few months are earning more than I am: they’re building tons of short term sites while I’m struggling to build sites with longterm potential. They’re raking in hundreds on their “chaff” sites, and by the time the chaff money runs out they can build some high quality wheat sites for the long term.
My earnings bounced up considerable from last month’s sad $190. In April I earned roughly:
- TOTAL: $249
- : $82
- LinkWorth: $28
- BlogHer: $64
- Independent ads: $43
- AdSense: $4.85
AdSense really isn’t pulling its weight, but I need to promote those chaff sites more. Since they are chaff and I’m prepared for their eventual toasting by the search engines, I can do easy stuff like directory submissions and article marketing. But I’ve got to do it, and lately…
…my time just hasn’t been mine. I’m starting to develop a reputation online based on my work with Project B-2 Bomber, and as a consequence, people are coming to me for answers and responses right and left. And I want to participate, because that’s the “making the world a better place” side of my life. That’s the stuff I’d have spent all my time doing if I was born with trust funds and didn’t need to earn a living. I’m learning to delegate and to remind people that I just don’t have time for everything they want from me.
I really really want to get to a point where I make enough money that I have time to do the stuff I really care about: trying to make the world a better place, and writing novels. Don’t worry about that first one: I’m not out campaigning to change laws - I just want to open minds and get people re-thinking a few things. Not the least of which is this insane concept that “working” means doing things that don’t need doing in order to justify your existence. I don’t think we should be working harder for the same money our parents worked for. I don’t think longer hours means better end results. Which, you know, is why I’m an affiliate marketer - to take control back in my life.
And on top of everything else, I’ve been hit with something in my personal life that’s going to suck many hours out of the next few weeks. To compensate, I’ve come up with a way to make the end result a much better situation than the one I’m currently in. Whoever said “if life hands you lemons, make lemonade” wasn’t thinking very big. If life hands you lemonades, put ‘em together with some other stuff and make a world-class lemon icebox pie, and then market it.
Huh… I had no intention of typing all that out when I started here, but I’m glad I did now.
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by Sapphire (April 30, 2008)
Konstructors has released a new admin theme for Wordpress 2.5+ that lets you:
- Set a color scheme you like (they offer several options, or an easy interface to create your own)
- Rearrange the admin page in a very logical fashion - you can tweak this to suit you..
The way they rearrange the page is even better than just putting everything back on the sidebar like it was in 2.3.3. Check it out, and click on the image to see it full size:
Categories and Tags are right below the write box where you won’t forget about them (and may not even need to scroll). Meanwhile just about everything else handy is in the sidebar. This is actually the best use of space design I’ve seen so far for Wordpress.
Because it also gives you the option of making the admin pages 100% width, you don’t need the Remove Max Width plugin if you use this one.
In other news, it looks like Wordpress 2.5.1 corrects the weirdness of the pre-filled “http://” in the insert link box. I’m so happy because that was really getting on my nerves.
Download Baltic Amber Admin theme plugin here.
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by Sapphire (April 29, 2008)
So Wordpress 2.5 doesn’t come with the ability to auto-update the whole installation after all. It also has a tendency to eat your posts if it doesn’t like the way you click publish. Gah!
I’ve found a plugin that upgrades your install automatically, but it’s got some bugs. Plus, one that I found - but there’s a workaround. First, using it in the non-automatic mode where it guides you through the “5 Easy steps” but you have to click “next” each time, worked perfectly for me. It’s the automatic mode where I had trouble: it doesn’t upgrade your plugins when it says it does.
After doing the automatic upgrade, you get a window which has two links (I’ve changed the links to bold formatting because otherwise they’d be the actual links for you to click and upgrade my database, which doesn’t sound like a good idea):
Congratulations!!! All the files have been upgraded to the latest version. Please CLICK HERE TO COMPLETE DATABASE UPGRADE (opens in new window and will show you a upgrade link only if database has to be upgraded) and come back here to reactivate your plugins
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO RE-ACTIVATE YOUR PLUGINS. AFTER YOU HAVE UPGRADED DATABASE
At this point, you want to click the first link and follow the instructions in the window it launches (you’ll have to log in again, too, if your server is configured like both of the hosts I use). Then you come back to this window to click the second link.
Only when I clicked it I got a “Are you sure you want to do that? Please try again” error. The plugins did not get reactivated.
Here’s the workaround, until the developer fixes this: you’ll be returned to the beginning screen (possibly after an option that says “Seems you have not performed cleanup process” or something like that - sorry, I had everything all nicely saved for this post, and then Wordpress 2.5.1 ate it for brunch and I have no more blogs to upgrade so I can’t recreate the error. But it’s worded something like that. Go ahead and click that link, whatever it says.
Now you’re definitely back at the beginning instead of on the “Congrats, you’re done” page. So you want to start all over with the auto install. This time, when you get to the page with the two links, ignore the database one and click the one to reactivate plugins. Now it will work: it’ll reactivate every plugin you had active, except any that give a fatal error with the new version of Wordpress.
And in case you’ve never, ever heard it before somehow back up your installation before you start to play with this plugin. That way the worst that can happen if you have to reinstall the backup and upgrade manually.
Wordpress automatic upgrade.
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by Sapphire (April 28, 2008)
A few months ago, I announced I was rebranding this site as Blue Mushrooms, and moving away from journaling and more toward actually providing good information to people who want to market online.
Since then my traffic has dropped a little. I thought long and hard this weekend and realized the following.
So I’m back to journaling. I’m importing all posts and comments from the Sapphire blog I started and killing that blog. I’ll continue to share good info, but mostly this site will be about me taking those “387,923 Difficult Painful Steps” that it takes to get to a full-time living online.
There’s another reason for this decision, though. Another thing I realized this weekend is that if I ever do figure out how to make tons of money online… I can’t exactly just blog it on here, can I? Then everyone would do it, and it would stop working for all of us. When you finally get where you’re going, there are some things you have to keep for yourself, and some things you can only sell at a price.
What you can always share freely is moral support. A laugh at your own mistakes. Reality checks. Those things have a lot of value. I’ll still be sharing the latest WP plugins and all that jazz. But instead of limiting myself to such “just the facts, ma’am” stories, I’ll also be posting about my perspective on what I’m trying, succeeding and failing to do online.
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