Tag Archives: Business

The Economics of Personal Development

Yesterday, I argued that premium-priced information marketing products didn’t provide any value over what’s freely available or what’s available for the price of a standard book or audiobook.

The only reasons to pay a premium price are to give back to the producer if they already provided an immense amount of value for free or to increase one’s engagement to the material due to the investment.

Then, why do information marketers provide premium-priced products? The obvious answer is to make money, but isn’t it better to publish a book or an audiobook, to reach more people, and make the same amount of money?

That seems to be a legitimate argument, and it might be true in some cases. But in most cases, the reach of these information marketers are limited.

They have to extract as much money as possible from their limited reach to make a living. First, not everybody in their already limited reach would purchase a product from them. Selling is already a tough business. If you get into that business once, you might as well ask a premium price.

For a customer, there’s a huge difference between getting a product for free and buying it for 99 cents. Once that chasm is crossed, the product might as well be a premium price product.

As irrational as this sounds, this is the economics of personal development, and you can read more about this in the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.

Coaching, Seminars, and Workshops

There’s another side of the personal development business. This is what I like to call services because unlike products, services involve interaction with the producer.

Coaching and workshops provide some value on top of the products. So, the amounts charged for these services can be justified.

The value in coaching and workshops is the interaction between the coach or the trainer and the coachee or trainee.

When I read a self-help question in Quora, it’s almost impossible for me to answer it accurately. I need to ask questions to that person to clarify their problem.

Otherwise, I’ll make an assumption about the problem of the person, and give a completely irrelevant answer. The personal interaction in coaching sessions and workshops facilitate this clarification process and personalization of the advice provided.

There’s a pitfall to coaching or workshops though. Most of the time, a single coaching session won’t make much of a difference in your life. Most coaching sessions are sold in packages of ten sessions. I’m pretty confident that a package of ten sessions won’t make any difference either.

After ten sessions, you’re barely scratching the surface. You and your coach are getting to know each other. The real results are achieved after 12 to 18 months of coaching.

So, if you see someone offering a premium-priced coaching session, don’t bet your last thousand dollars on a single coaching session with the hope of it changing your life.

Coaching is a process that requires time between sessions to apply the teachings in life and to do the exercises and then repeat the same process week after week for a year or two.

The Zen of Entrepreneurship

David Hawkins, the author of Power vs. Force, mentions 17 levels in his map of consciousness.

  • Enlightenment
  • Peace
  • Joy
  • Love
  • Reason
  • Acceptance
  • Willingness
  • Neutrality
  • Courage
  • Pride
  • Anger
  • Desire
  • Fear
  • Grief (Sadness)
  • Apathy
  • Guilt
  • Shame

Map of Consciousness, a Useful Tool for High Performance

I find this map useful to regulate my emotional state for high performance.

I find emotions of shame, guilt, sadness, fear, desire, anger, joy, love, and peace useful for different purposes.

  • Peace and sadness are suitable to reflect on my life and make plans.
  • Joy is useful for long distance running.
  • Anger is useful for working out with weights in the gym.
  • Shame, guilt, fear, desire, and love are powerful motivators to execute my plans.

Peace vs. Apathy

Even though I read the book Power vs. Force years ago, there were still some open questions in my mind. I always wondered what the difference between peace and apathy was.

Apathy is the lack of intense emotions. So is peace. Then, what is the difference between them?

I think I’ve found the answer.

The GDPR Will Destroy Email Lists

Yesterday, I had a challenge. The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect starting from May 25, 2018.

This regulation affects my email newsletter as well. I have to collect explicit consent from my newsletter subscribers before that date. After that date, I have to delete the subscribers who didn’t provide explicit permission.

If you ever operated an email newsletter, you know what that means. I expect only 10% of my subscribers to complete that procedure. That means I’m going to lose 90% of my email newsletter subscribers in two weeks.

The GDPR Makes the Subscription Process Harder

It doesn’t end there. The new law requires me to have a checkbox in my subscription form. If a visitor doesn’t explicitly check that box, they won’t be able to subscribe to my email newsletter. I expect at least 50% of the visitors to overlook that box.

I know that you’ll suggest some hacks for that, such as loading the form with that box checked or making it a required field. Both practices are forbidden in the new regulation.

On May 25, 2018, I’ll lose 90% of my existing subscribers and 50% of my future subscribers.

The Most Productive Level of Consciousness

On which level of consciousness would you be if you were in my shoes? Anger? Fear? Grief? Apathy?

Surprisingly, I felt acceptance yesterday. There is nothing I can do against this law. Neither anger, nor fear, nor grief, nor apathy is a productive emotion at this moment.

The most productive emotional state at this moment is to accept what is, comply with it, and carry on.

My livelihood doesn’t depend on this list. But there are people whose livelihood depend on email lists. They are going to lose at least 90% of their income in two weeks.

The New Law Won’t Accomplish Anything Useful

You might defend the new law because there are so many spammers out there. I know that a lot of people add all the emails they could find to their lists. As a result, we all receive a bunch of irrelevant emails every day.

  • Will the new law prevent spammers from populating their lists with every email they come across?
  • Will it prevent auto-followers on social media?
  • Will it prevent bots from spamming the comment sections and contact forms of blogs?

It’s not going to happen.

The New Law Will Only Hurt Legitimate Businesses

This law will only reduce the revenues of honest people and businesses who comply with the law. That reduction in revenue won’t serve anything.

The revenue will be reduced because a prospect will overlook a checkbox in a sign-up form, not because they didn’t want to sign up to the email newsletter in the first place.

I always had a double opt-in mechanism in my email lists. I never added someone manually. I never sold people’s emails. I never sent irrelevant emails to my subscribers. Yet, I’m punished by this law.

Take It on the Chin and Carry On

Acceptance means to take it on the chin and to carry on. That’s exactly what I’m going to do in this case. Quitting is not an option at this moment. Neither is breaking the law. If my content is worth the attention of people, it’s going to find its way to their screens.

Now, I get the difference between peace and apathy. When you’re on the level of apathy, you don’t feel any intense emotions, and you give up. When you’re on the level of peace, you don’t feel any strong emotions, but you keep on going.

High Involvement, Low Attachment

The lower levels such as anger, fear, guilt, and shame are strong motivators to take action. But at a certain moment, you need to accept the reality and let go of your attachments to the results. There’s no way around this.

In a previous post, I called this attitude high involvement, low attachment. You take massive action and do your best without being attached to the results.

While taking action, anger, fear, and similar emotions are strong motivators. But once the work is over and you’re waiting for the results, you better get to the level of acceptance and peace, and don’t get attached to those results.

A Nontaxable Asset

At the end of the day, there is one asset that governments can’t forbid or tax. That is your knowledge and the lessons you learn. I owe that lesson to Warrant Buffet.

Sometimes a lesson learned is more valuable than 90% of your email list. Understanding the difference between apathy and peace was such a lesson for me yesterday.

A Healthier Attitude toward Business Stats

There was a scene in the movie Social Network. Mark Zuckerberg and his team moved into their first office. They placed a big screen in the lobby showing the number of registered Facebook users. That number was going up continuously and motivating everybody in the team.

Business Dashboards

A similar practice is popular among executives nowadays. Instead of big screens in lobbies, executives have their key numbers on their computer screens. Those numbers are visualized in a few charts that fit a computer screen. This collection of charts are called dashboards.

An executive can see all the key numbers of their business with a single look on their dashboard. Think about the dashboard in your car. It’s a crucial part of driving. You need to know how fast you drive, how much fuel you’ve left, and whether your engine is overheating or not.

The Benefits of Dashboards

Business dashboards serve various purposes.

  • Motivation
  • Decision making
  • Determining the direction of the company
  • Detecting problems
  • Coming up with points of improvement
  • And so on…

The Numbers I Track

I track two numbers about my blog. The growth ratio of my Medium followers and my email newsletter subscribers. My target for both figures is 10% weekly growth. I explained this goal in a previous post called How I Use Growth Metrics to Optimize the Stats of My Blog and Email Newsletter.

Numbers are critical. Money is nothing but a collection of numbers in databases around the world. You need those numbers to pay the bills. If you want to improve your business, you need to keep track of your numbers. What gets measured gets improved.

However, numbers aren’t everything. When you’re driving, you don’t look at your dashboard all the time. You look at it at critical moments. During the rest of the time, you look at the road.

When running a business, it’s not so evident that you have to take your eyes off the dashboard once in a while. If you don’t pay attention, you can easily get lost in numbers and data. As a result, you might miss some critical aspects that can’t be measured by numbers.

Obsessing about Numbers

I was in that situation for a few weeks. The numbers of my blog are easy to track and extremely volatile. I hit my goals one week, miss them the next. This type of volatility can motivate you to the point of obsession. I wonder whether that kind of motivation is healthy.

Being obsessed with numbers can lead you to make mistakes. Think about a sales rep who makes unrealistic promises to their prospects to meet their targets. Think about a software developer checking in buggy code to complete their tasks before the deadline.

Stressing about Numbers

If you can’t reach your targets for an extended amount of time, you might be tempted to quit. Many people can’t handle the stress of not meeting their goals. As a result, they either give up, or they decrease their targets.

In our imagination, we expect linear growth. In practice, we experience long plateaus of mediocre results punctuated with growth spikes. You can check Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point for more about this.

My Unhealthy Relationship with Numbers

I had an unhealthy relationship with the numbers of my blog in the last few weeks. I obsessed about them. I didn’t think about hacking my way to reach my goals. Such a practice backfires in the long term, but I was demotivated when I couldn’t reach my targets in a given week.

A Healthy Attitude toward Numbers

I decided to change my relationship with the numbers of my blog.

  • I’ll keep tracking them, but I’ll quit obsessing about them.
  • I’ll use them as guides, not as punitive masters.
  • I’ll do my best to achieve my goals, but I won’t be attached to the results.

This approach is called high involvement, low attachment. I first read about this approach in the book Supercoach by Michael Neill. The idea is to do your best and let the chips fall where they may.

My New Practice

  • Check my numbers once a week. This is what I used to do anyway.
  • Brainstorm about action items to meet my targets of the next week.
  • Decide on action items to execute in the next week.
  • Execute those action items during the week.
  • Repeat all the steps every week.

The idea here is to work hard with a positive attitude. There is an optimal mental state for maximum performance. It isn’t being desperate, pessimistic, worried, or anxious. It’s being optimistic, having faith, being motivated, and accepting the results entirely.

Conclusion

Numbers are a critical part of a business. Without the numbers, you don’t have a business. Yet, obsessing about numbers can lead you to make mistakes. Worse, it can lead you to quit altogether.

The solution is to keep tracking the numbers with a healthy attitude, doing your best to achieve your goals, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Three Alternative Revenue Sources for Medium

In yesterday’s post, I explained why Medium’s subscription business isn’t sustainable. In essence, it satisfies neither readers nor writers.

I’m a big fan of Medium, and I want it to succeed. That’s why I’m going to share alternative income sources for Medium in this post.

Current Model Is Good for Users But Unsustainable

I’m not motivated by my interests when criticizing the current model and proposing alternatives. The current model is more beneficial for me than the one I suggest.

The current model gives me an excellent, ad-free platform to publish my posts and reach a significant audience. I’m afraid this won’t last long.

I propose a model that is less beneficial for me in the short term, but that will keep Medium afloat longer. That way, it will benefit us, writers and readers, in the long run.

Let’s go over the three alternative income sources for Medium.

Charge Writers for Publishing on Medium

Publishing on Medium is a privilege, and it should be treated as such.

If you charge for the opportunity to post on Medium, writers will approach the platform with greater respect.

Similar to the current system, a writer can publish three posts for free in a given month. That gives an opportunity to everybody to publish on the platform. Anything more than that will require the writer to pay Medium.

Writers would pay Medium for the exposure they get and for the audience they reach. That exposure and audience aren’t available anywhere else for free. It has a value that can be monetized.

What about Comments?

In this system, commenting will be free. If someone wants to publish a 45-minute post as a comment, that’s fine.

If my observations are correct, comments aren’t distributed as widely as standalone posts. Therefore, the writers who publish their posts as comments won’t get as much distribution as the writers who pay the subscription fee.

Charge Writers for Increased Distribution of Their Posts

Medium is a post distribution mechanism.

Writers benefit from getting their posts distributed to a relevant audience. They could increase their benefits by getting their posts distributed to more people. They could pay for that extra distribution.

I assume Medium is considering several criteria when distributing a post to an audience. These criteria might include the engagement of the readers, the tags of the post, the followers of the writer, and so on.

Each criterion has a weight in calculating the relevance score of a post to a reader. The posts with a higher score are displayed in a higher position to a reader.

We can add one more criterion to this overall score: the amount of cash paid by the writer.

I suggest keeping the weight of the distribution fee between 10% and 20% in the overall score of a post. If this weight is lower than 10%, writers won’t find it interesting to pay the distribution fee. If it is above 20%, the overall quality of the platform will suffer.

Sell Privacy Protection Packages

Nowadays, data is a gold mine, and privacy is a problem. In his last post, Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, states that Medium doesn’t sell data to third parties. This is an uncommon practice on the web.

Almost all digital products and services collect user data and sell it to third parties. This practice is a source of income for many websites.

By not selling data to third parties, Medium is benefiting its users. It’s only fair for Medium to charge for that benefit.

As I explained in my post on privacy, I recommend online businesses to offer two types of memberships to their users.

The first type is the free membership. Free memberships are subsidized by selling user data to third parties. This is the current online standard. Most of the websites, products, and services you use on a daily basis are funded with this system.

Privacy Protected Premium Memberships

The second type is a privacy-protected premium membership. In this tier, user data is not sold to third parties, but the user pays for the benefit.

Medium is leaving a lot of money on the table by not collecting and selling data to third parties. This alone could beat the income from their current paid membership model.

It Isn’t Possible to Safeguard Data Anyway

You might oppose this model, but third parties probably collect the data you enter to Medium and sell it further.

If you use Google’s Chrome browser or the Android OS, Google is collecting and commercializing your data anyway, even when you use Medium.

Even if you don’t use Google products, data finds its way to third parties. Here’s an experience I had recently.

My Medium Comment Leaked to YouTube

I access Medium only via Firefox on a Windows PC and Medium’s iOS app. Recently, I added a comment about IKEA to a Medium post. A few hours later, YouTube started to show me IKEA ads on another device.

I have no idea how that data is leaked to Google, but it leaked anyway. Data finds its way to third parties. Why not sell it yourself and charge the people who want to protect their privacy?

Conclusion

Medium’s current subscription-based business model doesn’t seem sustainable in the long run. There are three alternative revenue sources for Medium.

  • Charge writers to publish on Medium
  • Charge writers to increase their distribution on Medium
  • Commercialize the data of the free users and sell privacy protection packages to premium users.

These revenue sources seem to put readers and writers in a disadvantaged position in the short term, but they are more sustainable than the current model in the long run.

If the current model fails, we will lose Medium altogether. Paying for publishing posts, increased distribution, and privacy protection is a small price to pay to keep Medium afloat.

Your Turn

  • What do you think about the revenue sources proposed in this post?
  • Do you have alternative revenue sources for Medium?

Is Medium’s Business Model Sustainable?

If you look at my archive, you’ll see at least a dozen posts on Medium. Almost all of those posts are praising Medium.

I take Medium seriously, use it as the single source of traffic, and learn a lot of lessons from my Medium stats. It’s an excellent platform for readers, writers, and humanity.

In short, I’m a fan of Medium. Nevertheless, I don’t believe in its business model, and I’ll explain why.

The Number of Paid Memberships Is Growing

In his last post, Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, shares the progress of Medium’s subscription business.

Mr. Williams shares a chart of the daily new members and the total number of members. Both numbers seem to be growing, but there aren’t actual numbers on the chart. We don’t know whether the total number of premium members are 10K, 100K, or 1M.

50K Weekly Writers, 80M Monthly Unique Visitors

Mr. Williams cites other stats. More than 50K writers publish at least once a week on Medium. Medium received more than 80M unique visitors in a recent 30 day period. Those are some strong numbers.

There is a critical question to be asked though.

What is the conversion rate of the 50K writers and 80M unique visitors to premium members?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t think that conversion rate is high enough to sustain Medium in the long run.

Spotify’s Value Proposal

To justify the premium membership model, Mr. Williams mentions other businesses based on similar models. One of his examples is Spotify.

I’m a premium Spotify member since it became available where I live. There’s a huge difference between Spotify’s premium and free offering.

  • Ad-free
  • Unlimited skips
  • Listen offline
  • Play any track
  • High-quality audio

That difference is worth more than the €100 I pay them every year, especially considering their vast, ever-growing back catalog.

Medium Premium’s Value Proposal

I don’t see a difference that is worth $50 / year between the free and premium versions of Medium.

  • Premium posts don’t have marketing messages, not even links to email newsletters.
  • You can save stories to an offline reading list.
  • There are some commissioned stories.
  • You can listen to the audio versions of popular stories.

Medium Premium’s Competition

In the premium content space, Medium’s offering can’t compete with Kindle and Audible as far as I’m concerned.

In the free content space, Medium is the biggest competitor of its own premium membership business. In the free audio segment, there are more than enough quality podcasts.

While trying to prove his case, Mr. Williams is making some sad remarks in his post.

“There is — and probably always will be — a surplus of free content. But that’s like saying there’s a surplus of free food in the dumpster behind the alley.” Ev Williams [1]

“Will people just lower their standards? Perhaps. In fact, our standards have been gradually lowering for years. We’ll read crap on the web we wouldn’t have put up with in print.” Ev Williams [1]

Free Content Isn’t Necessarily Crap

I don’t read “free crap” on the web. The posts that I read on Medium aren’t the content equivalent of the free food in the dumpster.

I always have a Kindle book or an Audible audiobook as an alternative. I read a free Medium post, because I think I’m going to get something out of it. The cost of a Kindle book is irrelevant to me compared to the time I invest in it.

Who decides that the premium content on Medium is better than the free content on Medium? What is the decision criteria?

A Medium post is premium, because its author decided so. Outside of the no marketing rule, there are no criteria that separate a premium post from a free post, as far as I can see.

What’s the motivation to provide outstanding content on Medium?

A writer can have several motivations.

  • Spread ideas.
  • Get some exposure.
  • Build an audience.
  • Market products or services.
  • Make some money.

A paid membership website isn’t the best way to spread your ideas, get exposure, and build an audience. Marketing isn’t welcome in premium posts. Money isn’t significant either.

“In February 2018, 56% of authors who published at least one story for members earned money — making $58.45 on average for the month.” Medium Marketing Message [2]

Sure someone made $9K in a month, and a post made $1K, but those figures are possibly outliers. They probably don’t represent a reliable income. If I were that writer, I wouldn’t get a mortgage counting on that $9K monthly income.

Buy a Membership to Support Medium

You might argue that you have a Medium membership, because you want to support Medium’s cause. I acknowledge that. I donated to Wikipedia and other non-profits in the past.

I could buy a Medium membership to support it. However, that’s not the point. Medium doesn’t ask us to donate them money.

Medium is trying to sell us something as a for-profit company. There’s nothing wrong with that. I evaluate Medium as a commercial product, not as a non-profit.

Conclusion

Medium’s premium program doesn’t provide sufficient value to the consumers. It doesn’t offer enough value to the writers either.

If the subscription model can’t satisfy the primary stakeholders, how is it going to become a sustainable business?

The subscription model doesn’t convince me, but there are other business models that Medium can use. I’m going to publish a post about one of them tomorrow.

Your Turn

  • What do you think about Medium’s subscription-based business model?
  • Are you a premium member?
  • If so, what made you a premium member?
  • If not, what keeps you from becoming a premium member?

How I Deal with Failure

In the last six weeks, I was focused on two numbers to measure the success of my blog. These are the weekly growth rates of my Medium following and the number of my email newsletter subscribers.

My weekly goal for both figures is 10%. That goal is at the ambitious side and I have a difficult time achieving it every week.

So far, my average was 7%. Not bad, but not being able to succeed my goal every week frustrates me a little. That’s why I want to look at other sides of my efforts than the weekly goals.

The Big Picture vs. Short Term Challenges

Online business expert Gary Vaynerchuk recommends to focus on “the clouds and dirt” and to avoid everything in between. The clouds is the long term vision. The dirt is the tasks and challenges in front of you.

In my case, the dirt is my weekly goals and how I want to achieve them. I’ve been focused on the dirt for the last six weeks. Today, I want to look at the clouds, the vision, the big picture of my efforts.

The Karmic Management Model

I’ll use the karmic management model of Michael Roach to analyze my blog. I discussed this model in detail in my post A Buddhist Monk’s Take on Business.

The Ideal and Less than Ideal Business

I make a distinction between ideal and less than ideal businesses. Ideal businesses add value to humanity. Less than ideal businesses extract value from the humanity.

Ideal businesses make a positive difference in the lives of other people. They provide value. That value has a financial equivalent. Ideal businesses receive a fraction of that value.

Less than ideal businesses extract value from the humanity. They do that by exploiting the weaknesses of people.

Most of us have their irrationalities. Some of those irrationalities are predictable. Less than ideal businesses build their business on exploiting those predictable irrationalities.

The World Is Not Black and White

Obviously, we can’t make a black and white distinction between ideal and less than ideal businesses. As I explained in my post the Fallacy of Extremism, that would be a childish outlook on life. Most businesses are somewhere between both polarities.

For example, gambling businesses provide some value by entertaining their customers. Educational businesses have to use some marketing techniques to convince their prospects to pay for their products and services.

In either case, I want to be closer to the ideal end of the spectrum.

Four Stakeholders in a Business

The karmic management model takes into account four parties to measure the potential of a business.

  1. Customers
  2. Employees
  3. Suppliers
  4. Humanity at large

I want to add a fifth party to this model: myself.

Customers

I plan to build an information marketing business around my blog. So far, I have been writing mainly about personal development and marketing.

Personal Development

I consumed a lot of personal development products and services. Those products and services made significant differences in my life. Some of those products and services were paid. There was an exchange of value both ways.

In some cases, I paid more than what the product or service was worth for. In some cases, I received great value for free. Some free YouTube channels and videos made significant, tangible, positive changes in my life.

In either case, I’m more than satisfied as a paying customer of the personal development industry. My own experience is a validation of the personal development business.

Marketing

In the past, I developed several products. Those products benefited their users, but I wasn’t able to commercialize them. Marketing and sales were the missing link between those products and their prospective users.

I’m not alone. A lot of gifted people have a difficult time building a business around their skills. They have a difficult time building products and services using their skills or commercializing the products and services they offer.

I want to create content that helps people build and commercialize products and services around their skills. But first, I have to figure that out myself. I work on it and I document everything that I learn on my journey.

I already receive the feedback that the lessons I share resonate with people. If you want to receive the latest lessons I discover on my journey, sign up to my weekly email newsletter.

Bottom line, I believe that there is value for my prospective customers in my information marketing business, both in personal development and marketing segments.

Employees

I don’t have any employees at the moment. There’s only one person who helps me with household once a week. I’m grateful for their services, because they save me a complete day every week.

As I build a business around my blog, I could hire freelancers such as virtual assistants, programmers, and writers.

Suppliers

My business would benefit several suppliers. I already pay for hardware, software, internet connection, and for some tools, such as Evernote and Google Drive.

I review the tools that I use in my blog posts. I believe that is fair value provided to my suppliers.

Humanity

I serve humanity by providing as much value as I can in the ideal side of business.

Myself

I enjoy blogging, writing, developing products and services on personal development and marketing.

Conclusion

Sometimes, we lose the big picture of our businesses by being too focused on day to day details. That was the case with my weekly goals.

Today, I wrote down my business vision using the karmic management principles. Now, I can clearly see the long term benefits of my business to its prospective customers, suppliers, employees, humanity at large, and myself.

All of that helps me put things in perspective and not get frustrated when I miss a weekly goal or two.

Don’t Sacrifice What Can’t Be Measured

Six weeks ago, I published a post about measuring the success of my blog and email newsletter with growth metrics. Since then, I’m obsessed with numbers and dived deep into my stats.

I published several posts about the lessons I learned from my stats. Here are some highlights.

These and many others helped me reach a bigger audience, express myself better, and get more responses. That’s why I say “data is gold if you know how to use it.”

Pitfalls of Using Data

Data is extremely useful, but it can also be extremely distracting. If I’d dive into Google Analytics, I could spend months on it without adding any value to my blog. That’s an obvious pitfall of using data.

There’s a less obvious pitfall. That is focusing on the numbers at the expense of what can’t be measured. That’s a subtle pitfall.

Make no mistake. I don’t downplay the importance of numbers. At the end of the day, we all have bills to pay and bills are paid by numbers. But focusing solely on numbers can backfire in the long term.

Focusing solely on numbers can backfire in the long term.

How I’m Deceived by Numbers

In a previous post, I argued that my about page wasn’t that important. It only accounted for 2% of the page views of my blog.

When I was writing my post the next day, I changed my mind. The about page might be critical. Its 2% page views might come from the most enthusiastic readers. By not having an up-to-date about page, I might be missing an opportunity.

What Can’t Be Measured Is Equally Important

Numbers are important, but what can’t be measured is equally important. On the one hand, we have quantitative analysis, and on the other hand qualitative analysis.

How can we measure the honesty of a blog post? Yet, honesty is a critical factor in the long term success of a blogger.

Short Term vs. Long Term

I think this all comes down to short term vs. long term. Numbers are great at optimizing short term results.

Sometimes, optimizing short term results is also good for optimizing long term results, but not always.

If short term and long term goals contradict with each other, I prefer long term goals.

Most of the time, there’s greater value in the long term.

As I explained in my post, Quick Cash vs. Long Term Value, I made zero dollars from my blog so far. I experimented a few weeks with Steemit and already started to make money on that platform.

If I looked at the numbers, working on Steemit seemed to be better than working on my blog.

After a few weeks, I quit Steemit in order to focus on my blog. Steemit didn’t seem to be a sustainable business model. The lifetime potential of my blog seemed to be greater than the potential of Steemit.

If I needed some cash in the short term, I’d keep working on Steemit. I don’t. That’s why I skipped the quick cash.

Quick cash is more expensive in the long term.

The Right Tools for the Right Goals

It’s important to use the right tools for the right goals. Some tools are more suitable to optimize qualitative goals. Others are more suitable to optimize quantitative goals.

Two weeks ago, I published a post about commenting on Medium. In that post, I argue that commenting on Medium doesn’t boost one’s number of followers. I received a lot of responses to that post. My readers argued about the benefits of commenting.

I agree that commenting has a lot of benefits.

  • It builds relationships with other readers and writers.
  • You develop new ideas with others.
  • You receive answers to your questions.
  • You come up with new topics to write about.

All of those benefits are qualitative benefits. If you use commenting for its qualitative benefits, you’re going to act different than if you use it for its quantitative benefits.

Commenting for Qualitative Benefits

If you comment for its qualitative benefits, you’ll take your time to understand the post, and you’ll comment to add something to the discussion, including asking a question.

If you comment for its quantitative benefits, you’ll read a few paragraphs of a post, quickly jot down a few sentences, and repeat that for dozens of posts every day.

Guess which one would be more effective?

Quantitative Goals Might Not Match the Nature of Reality

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” John Lennon

Another pitfall of using statistics is that we make linear plans. My weekly 10% growth goal is a typical example of this. Most of the time, life doesn’t work like that. Growth comes in spikes after long periods of plateaus (Fig.1).

Fig. 1. Linear Growth vs Quantum Leaps

As I have written in a previous post, it took me 55 blog posts to get published in the Startup Publication. 17 of those posts have 0 views to this date, 12 only 1, and 7 only 2.

Conclusion

You can measure some factors, but you can’t measure others.  If you can’t measure a factor, that doesn’t mean it’s an unimportant one.

Honesty, relationships, and karma can’t be measured. Yet, they play a critical role in success.

Karma is unmeasurable.

Take into account quantitative analysis to optimize your business, but not at the expense of qualitative analysis.

Data Is the Gold If You Know How to Use It

There are two famous aphorisms about online marketing. “Content is king.” and “Money is in the (email) list.”

Both expressions have a point. They summarize the decade long experience of online marketers. Content and email lists are critical components of online marketing.

There is a third component that doesn’t have its own aphorism yet. That component already became the most critical part of many online marketing businesses.

I’m talking about data. We all heard about big data. The term big data sounds like something that can only be used by multinational corporations. That’s not true.

You can make use of data in your small business, even in your personal social media account or blog. I already explained how I use Medium stats to improve my blogging. However, there are two pitfalls for beginners when working with data.

Pitfall #1. Data as Distraction

I published a blog post about possible pitfalls for the first time bloggers called Read This before You Start a Website or Blog.

In essence, when you first start a website or blog, there are a lot of things you can do. One of those things is to install Google Analytics and AdSense to your website.

Then, you hit the refresh button every five minutes to check the number of visitors and the money you made. I know this too well, because I’ve been there too.

Using Data as Entertainment

Google Analytics and AdSense becomes a slot machine for the first time blogger. They hit the refresh button like they’d pull the lever of a slot machine.

Those tools become a tools of entertainment. The first time blogger expects a prize from those tools. As a result, they waste their time and attention on them, instead of working on their blog.

If this sounds like you, I recommend you read my post The Only Tip You Need to Grow Your Audience as a Blogger.

How Do the Professionals Use Data?

I’m a full time software developer. Sometimes, we come across performance problems in our software. When that happens, we use a specific type of software called “profiler.”

A profiler shows us which code parts consume the most resources. Then we optimize those code parts for resource consumption. Our goal is to eliminate those bottlenecks.

Can You See the Difference Between How a Professional and an Amateur Uses Data?

A professional uses data for a specific goal. They use it to make a certain decision. They use it to take a certain action. They use it to learn something valuable that they can use later. They use data only, when it is needed.

An amateur sees data as entertainment. They expect the data to make them happy. They see it as a playground or casino. They keep playing with it without any specific goal.

Data is either actionable or useless. If you can’t use it to make a decision, take an action, or learn a lesson, it’s useless.

Pitfall #2. Lack of Big Picture

How does your data serve your overall goals? If you don’t have the answer to that question, you might be misusing data.

By improving some parameters in your data set, you might actually worsen the overall performance of your business. I touched upon this issue in my post Measuring the Contribution of My Medium Posts to My Content Marketing Goals.

How to Avoid the Pitfalls When Using Data?

If you want to avoid the pitfalls when using data, start with writing down what your objective is. Then, write down which information you need from data to serve that objective. Coming up with a relevant set of questions is the first step to success.

An Example

My goal is to improve the conversion rate of email newsletter subscriptions in my blog. Here are a few questions that would help me with that goal.

  • Which pages are the landing pages of my blog?
  • What is the performance of each landing page?
  • Which landing pages perform better or worse than the average?
  • Why?
  • What are the exit pages of my blog?
  • Why do the visitors exit from those pages without subscribing to the newsletter?

These are just a few of the many more questions that I ask myself. When I have the answers to those questions, I’ll come up with a set of action items based on those answers.

  • Improve the performance of landing pages.
  • Plug the leaks in the exit pages.
  • Promote the pages that perform better on social media.

Conclusion

Data is the gold mine of the day, but you need to know how to use it.

You can use it as entertainment. You can use it to optimize specific parameters without seeing the big picture. Both usages are pitfalls.

If you want to make the best of your data,

  1. Start with a big picture, your overall goal,
  2. Ask a set of questions that would serve that goal,
  3. And take action based on the answers you get from your data.

Does Your World View Cause Unnecessary Stress and Poor Performance?

The way we see the world affects the way we approach life. Most of us see life as a zero sum game with winners and losers. That world view is inaccurate. It results in unnecessary stress and poor performance.

Life as a Chess Game

If you look at life as a chess game, there are three possible outcomes for you.

  • You win.
  • You lose.
  • Draw.

Life as a Poker Game

If you look at life as a poker game, you have again three possible outcomes.

  • You might end up with more money than you start.
  • You might end up with less money than you start.
  • You might end up with exactly the same amount.

Let’s omit the rake paid to the cardroom. Let’s say that the players can’t add or take away chips from the table.

In this case, the total amount of money on the table is the same at the start, during, and at the end of the game. It is only redistributed among players throughout the game.

Life as a Game with Winners and Losers

Most people see life as a zero sum game with winners and losers. Some people think that they are put in a disadvantageous position. They blame the winners for their losses.

Others think that they have to compete ruthlessly and beat everybody they come across. Needless to say, both approaches are inaccurate. Both approaches make life harder.

Life is Not a Zero-Sum Game.

Let’s take Medium as an example. Let’s say you want to maximize your followers on Medium. Does that mean you have to minimize other people’s followers? No, social media doesn’t work like that. Users can follow as many people as they want.

You might argue that there’s a fixed number of people on Medium who spend a fixed number of hours on it. If you want to maximize your stats, you have to minimize other people’s stats.

Is that assumption correct? Are there fixed number of people on Medium? No, that’s a variable number. Do Medium users spend a fixed number of hours on it? No, that’s a variable number as well.

If you and I produce quality content and offer value to our readers, we will attract more readers and reading hours to Medium.

Economy in General

Think about economy in general. You might think that the money circulating in the economy is fixed. The same amount of money is redistributed among people. That isn’t correct either.

Each year businesses flood the market with goods and services. As a result, prices go down. To fight deflation, central banks print money.

That way, the amount of goods and services and the amount of money in the economy is expected to increase every year. Economy in general is not a zero sum game.

What Is the Best Approach to Life?

If the life isn’t a zero sum game with winners or losers, it doesn’t make sense to blame others or trying to beat them.

If the total value in the system is variable, the best approach to life is to produce as much value as you can.

This game is not about beating each other. It is about beating your past performance. Therefore, the best approach to life is continuous improvement.

In continuous improvement, you measure where you are today. Then, you try to improve your results every week, every month, and every year.

Continuous improvement eliminates all the unnecessary stress caused by trying to beat others. It leads to achieving the best results that you can.

Your Turn

  • Do you believe that life is a zero sum game with winners and losers?
  • Do you believe that when someone wins, you lose?
  • Do you try to beat everybody that comes your way?

Five Requirements for a Marketing Automation Tool

Yesterday, I published a post about CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. CoSchedule is a paid online marketing management platform. They offer the headline analyzer as a free tool to promote their main business.

The Need for a Marketing Management System

Even though I have a single author blog, I could make use of a marketing management system. Today, I want to write down my requirements for such a system, so that I could compare my requirements to what they offer.

Eventually, I could decide whether I want to start using their system or not. Or I could look for another system.

A Startup Idea

If you’re looking for an idea to start a tech business, you can also use the requirements in this post to start your own online marketing management tool. If you do so, let me know, so that I could give your system a try.

My Daily and Weekly Blogging Routine

At this moment, my daily and weekly blogging routine isn’t clearly defined. I have it vaguely defined in my mind and I follow certain patterns.

I can benefit from defining a daily and weekly workflow. That would eliminate the guess work of what to do at a given time.

The Daily Routine

  • Create content.
  • Publish a post in my blog.
  • Import my blog post to Medium.
  • Answer blog comments.
  • Answer Medium responses.
  • Answer Twitter responses.
  • Promote previous blog and Medium posts on Twitter.

Requirement #1. I’d like the automation tool to create daily tasks for each step of my daily routine with the priority list I wrote above.

Content creation. This is more complicated than a single step in the daily routine. But I want to keep things simple at this moment. I’ll return to this in another post.

Publish a post in my blog. I don’t see any requirement for the automation tool for this step.

Import my blog post to Medium. At this moment, I follow the steps below to import my blog post from my WordPress blog to Medium. Even though the ability to import your blog post is great, there is some room for improvement.

  • Copy and paste the blog post link to the Medium import page. Hit the import button.
  • Add the pictures to the Medium post.
  • Correct the formatting of the quotes.
  • Remove the related posts section at the end.
  • Add the signature I use for Medium.
  • Add the tags of the post.
  • Submit the post to the Startup Publication.

Requirement #2. Obviously, all the steps above could be automated. I’d like the automation tool to execute all the steps above as soon as I publish a post on my blog without me interfering. I’d like to receive a confirmation email with a link to the imported post.

The steps above could eventually be implemented by Medium. Or I could hire a virtual assistant to delegate them.

Requirement #3. I want the automation tool to create three separate lists for my blog post, Medium, and Twitter comments and responses.

A task with a link to the related comment and response should be created for each of them. The task should remain open unless I mark it complete. An option to auto-delete complete tasks after X days.

Promote previous blog and Medium posts on Twitter. There’s a lot of value in this step.

At the moment, I log into Twitter around once a day. I do all Twitter work at once. Sometimes, I publish more than one tweet in the same session. I don’t think this is optimal.

I know that there are tools to schedule tweets. I used them ten years ago. Back in the day, Twitter blocked my tweets scheduled by a third party. For that reason, I am reluctant to use them. This might be the time to change.

Fig. 1. Medium highlight card

Requirement #4. Medium has beautiful highlight cards (Fig. 1). I’d like to be able to send those cards to the automation tool, instead of tweeting them immediately.

When I send those cards to the automation tool, it creates a new task for me to schedule it. Then, I’d like to be able to schedule those cards to be published on different platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on.

The Weekly Routine

  • Publish the weekly email newsletter.
  • Write and post the weekly online mastermind group report.
  • Process ideas and come up with a content plan for the next week.
  • Check the new followers, highlights, and claps on Medium.

I’m probably missing some steps in the daily and weekly routine, but this is the first version anyway. So, let’s move on to the last requirement.

Requirement #5. Create tasks for each step of the weekly routine. Integrate the weekly tasks in the main task list.

The daily and weekly tasks have to be merged and sorted according to the priority of each task. For example, the weekly email newsletter has a higher priority than responding to the daily comments.

Conclusion

There are two types of improvements in my blogging routine.

  • Automating existing steps such as importing posts to Medium and promoting existing posts on social media.
  • Creating a workflow and a to-do list based on my routine and the signals received from different channels.

Future Work

There are two tasks in my routine that require separate, detailed workflows. Those tasks are content creation and processing stats for the weekly reports. I’ll discuss them in separate blog posts.

Your Turn

  • Do you know a marketing automation tool that could satisfy the requirements above? At least partially?
  • Do you have any experience using marketing automation tools?
  • Are you inspired to develop one?