Make Money Online

Minimum effective dose, someone’s planning for Burning Man.

Yeah, no, there’s something valid there, right? So. You don’t. I saw a website recently that just said, give me your email address. And it’s like 25 calls to action about getting the person’s email address. And it’s like, you scroll down this way in the page. Will you have my email address or give me your email address now? And then, like, a modal popover occurs. Will you give me your email address? It’s this point. Here’s a photo of me. I’ve heard that photos provide social proof and convert better. Will you give me your email address? And all of this stuff. And It’s funny, but it’s also a little bit on the nose, right? Like demand, it’s not enough to just ask for the person’s email address. That doesn’t actually work in practice. You need to recognize that people are always wondering what’s in it for them. Right. So I’m going to take this into the real world and outside of the computers online business for a moment and say, let’s say you’re throwing a party. Okay, well, you’re throwing the party in part because you like to throw the party. But you’re also throwing the party in part because people like to go to the party, right? Like, you’re not going to have people at the Party, unless you give them a good time at the party. Now the best parties that I’ve been to consider the motivations and intentions of the people that are actually going to be attending it. So it’s not like you’re throwing a meeting and providing actionable business insights at the party, although you might. If you’re that deep in your job, but you have to recognize: okay, well, this person likes meeting this type of person. Okay, well, you just say, Alright, well, I’m going to be inviting a bunch of other bootstrappers, or I’m going to be inviting a bunch of other designers, and it’s going to be a designer party, and now designers can talk about design-y stuff. Or just people doing dope shit in Logan Square, and you’re getting the top performers from Logan Square around a campfire sometime. And you recognize that and say, okay, that’s the purpose behind it. So you have to, there is, I cannot find a single point in my life where Something wouldn’t benefit from incentivization, right? Like giving somebody a good reason to do something. Even when they might be Likely to provide acts of generosity. Your email address is not an act of generosity, right? People are highly suspicious of providing one on the Internet at this point because everybody does email marketing. So you have to step it up a little bit and provide something free for them that continues to provide value to them. So, I’ll turn this back around to you now that we’ve kind of set the table about it. And, like, what are the contours of that? What does that look like for you?

What I’m hearing out of this is you might be putting together freebie and it might not convert well. Try again. Number two, don’t Do something that sounds proprietary. Make it extremely clear what it is the person is going to be getting. So, designers do this all the time, where they like. They like to trademark their process and they’re like, download the draft process. And it’s like, what the hell am I getting? What is this? What are you doing? And number three is: don’t make out on the first date. You have to provide something that is small and compact and valuable enough, and they should be able to take it, read it in, let’s say, 10 minutes, tops, and take action. On whatever it is you provide. So it’s not just a thinky thing. It’s not just a manifesto. You and I are both white dudes, and we’re very good at writing manifestos. Don’t write a manifesto in this situation. So you need to write something that’s like a checklist, a to-do list. Maybe a designers love heuristic evaluations. Provide your list of heuristics.

Yeah, yeah, like. I mean, the big takeaway is also: don’t do anything in your business ever that does not fit the positioning, right? Like. then you’re not doing something that’s part of your business. You’re doing personal work. And it’s okay to do personal work. I run a meetup called Design Football. It has nothing to do with draft or AB testing. I promote it on my website, on my personal website. You cannot see it anywhere on draft. But you know, don’t let yourself get distracted by the shiny and absolutely don’t do that with something that is the thing that gets customers in the door, right? Like, my God. They’re going to expect one thing and then get thrown off, and you’re going to alienate your target market. That’s not how you build a thoughtful, considered business.

We did a whole episode about making yourself more efficient in the content that you create. And the goal, like kind of the end game with that, was a Publishing empire of sorts, right? And you’re doing whatever you can to use your skills well, right? So You’re basically publishing, right? Creating video is publishing. Screencasts are publishing. Creating a podcast is publishing. Writing is publishing Writing with a ton of images is publishing. Annotating a PowerPoint presentation and putting it on the Internet on SlideShare is publishing, and some people do that extremely well. I’m thinking of like Samuel Hewlett from User Onboard. None of those are bad, you know? It is better to make the clackety noise and do the thing than it is to not do the thing. You can let yourself be riven by shame that you’re not doing X or Y publishing medium. Like, how many video things have you seen me on? Right? I can count it. I can count it on two hands and I’d have fingers left. And they’re all pretty well buried on the Internet. I’m not exactly like a video guy. But I sound good. I sound good enough that you, dear listener, are listening to this podcast and you haven’t turned it off yet. So, you know, that’s a benefit, right? I mean, in the freebie offering, as in life, play to your strengths. Now, towards that end, I think it’s more important to consider where the freebie offering fits into your strategy, right? So, what I typically recommend is the freebie offering ladders up to a relatively affordable, I will not use the term cheap. offering that you’re going to do that’s the bigger e-book, the 150 page out thing. If you’re a designer like an icon library or a You know, series of guidelines that walk somebody through a process that you’ve built or something like that. Anything that you can do. That is basically the thing that you’re known for. So for me as a designer, it’s a book I wrote about interaction design called Cadence and Slang. That’s pretty sensible. Something that fits better with my positioning these days is a monthly paid newsletter called uh Revise Weekly, where I provide lessons about A-B testing every Monday. The end point of that, you may be creating a freebie offering, a five part course, like a simple drip campaign. I mean, that’s a good place to start. I would tool that and rethink it in your business as needed. And then the end point of that drip campaign is the upsell that you have, and then slot them into your regular mailing list where you provide them your usual content that everybody else is getting. And that educates them, provides numerous acts of generosity. That drip campaign should be highly actionable and valuable for somebody, and some of your best work, to be entirely honest. and some of your most general work, that’s very statement of purposey. But also it should lead into a sale. You should be closing a sale. And that sale should be low involvement. It should not be so low that you’re undercharging yourself. My target dollar amount for this is somewhere between about thirty and fifty dollars. I typically create something that’s about that much $10 thing, nobody’s going to care. They’re also going to undervalue you and your abilities. So charge more for what you’re doing. Always charge more for what you’re doing. And Then once you’re in, you have effectively a product ladder. So what I typically would like to do in my business, and this is very much a do as I say, not as I do scenario. I would love to have a book or a course or something like that that after you’ve bought Revised Weekly or My Book or something like that. or any of my books really, then you are put into another drip campaign that provides more advanced content and ladders you up to something between one hundred fifty and three hundred dollars. That’s probably another educational product. I don’t have that together yet. I’m working on it. But it’s something that also provides like a more advanced thing. It’s more passive income. We talked a lot about passive income on a previous episode. And that provides a significant amount of value to the customer, right? And also it positions you as more of a premium offering, right? So along the way, you should always be Trying to position yourself as if you are a prize to be had. Not just because people will pay you more money. but because they’re more likely to actually read the thing, right? I can’t tell you how many people I know have bought Cadence and Slang and been like, I haven’t read it. It’s been five years. Like you’re never going to read it. You bought it because it looks fancy on your bookshelf. And I get it. That makes perfect sense. But I would rather you read my book. I do not make my book and put all of the effort into making the book just so it can be a fetish object on your books. Bookshelf. Like that’s not cool. You should read the book. And you should take the book seriously and apply its lessons. I can count on probably two hands and I would have fingers left. The number of people I know who have confirmedly told me I read Cadence and Slang, and it changed the way that I designed. I’ve sold 3,000 copies of this book. Don’t let that happen to you. You want impact. You hopefully are listening to this wanting to change the world. And you don’t change the world by selling $9 e-books. You don’t. You don’t even really build a business. You make $900 by selling $9. Yeah, you make $900. Okay, great. You have covered your rent for a month. Do it again. Congratulations. Are you going to write a like 300-page or 150-page e-book every month? I fucking hope not. If you take anything from this, it’s that you should be I Kai and I are very very lazy people We really don’t want to be doing that. We want to be. I’m going to a tiki bar tonight. I’m not writing a book, you know, like I have created space in my life to do the things that I want. And if you have taken anything, it’s that you too can be really lazy by busting your ass and writing an e-book. and marketing it and not charging nine dollars for it. So we talked a lot about product ladders in an earlier episode as well. This kind of fits into the ecosystem of a lot of the things that we’re talking about. And the freebie offering is the first thing that you do. But it’s also the most important, right? So you can’t mess it up. And in order to not mess it up, you have to make it highly general to your positioning. Like This is why I come into work every day. What is the thing I think is insane about my profession? That. Right? And then highly actionable and highly understanding of the person’s context. If you don’t understand the person’s context, talk to them. Get people on the phone. Take them out for coffee. Do basic user research. It’s even if you’re a developer, you know. Sorry.

So Kai, I I’m very excited to report that we’ve come to an important moment in Make Money Online history. It is the first time that I’m going to make a tortured home repair analogy as a homeowner. On this podcast, there will be more eventually. You are basically, let’s imagine you’re a homeowner and you need a screwdriver. You go to the hardware store, you buy a screwdriver. I can’t think of a screwdriver in history that has changed the world, but the screwdriver helps, right? And it’s simple. It’s like 10 bucks to get a screwdriver, like a nice one, right? You are handing the customer a screwdriver during a time when they need a screwdriver. You are responding to their needs with something that is briefly useful. I am not using a screwdriver right now. I am talking on this podcast. I use a screwdriver maybe cumulatively. There’s probably a contiguous hour and a half period in my life where I am using a given screwdriver, right? Like. That much of screwdriving. It’s not something that I think of all the time, but it’s just like, that dude helped me. You know, that’s good. That hardware store helped me. And then all of a sudden, build up a reputation. The hardware store gave me a useful screwdriver at a time when I needed it. They were open when I needed it. Okay, now I’m going to go back and buy the set of screwdrivers. Now, I’m going to go back and buy a tool shed for the screwdrivers. And then all of a sudden, I’m at Home Depot reenacting the first 15 minutes of Nick D buys a house. buying like filling my entire van with hundreds of dollars of random garbage that I only barely need I would like that for your business, right? You start by buying the small, low-involvement things. I remember one of the first times I went to Home Depot, I bought. Like laundry detergent and batteries. And it was like right when I was in college. And that was it. And I never thought about more beyond that. It was like maybe like a $25 purchase. Like it was not very much. The amount of money I blew at Home Depot last week is greater than the GDP of some nations, probably. You know? And I remembered that. That happened 14 years ago. Right? On the long time scale, you’re thinking about the relationship that you establish with someplace. And it’s not like Home Depot is a tiny mom and pop store. But I can think about it in the same way with the mom and pop store, right? I’ve gone. How many times have I gone to Bari, which is this tiny family-run Italian joint in like old little Italy around River West in the city? And I started going there for sandwiches that were $4 and then eventually started buying Parm and Cola Vita and other extremely important staples in my house. And I trusted them more, right? It’s about trust. Think about all the times that you, dear listener, have. Gone out and bought like durable goods from someplace, and you spent $5, and then you find yourself spending $50, and then you find yourself blowing an entire paycheck there, you know? The same thing happens in luxury goods. You go to Barty’s, you buy the like $2 belt, and then you buy the like $50 T-shirt, and then you end up, you know, eventually you work up the money and you’re buying your dress there. or you’re buying a suit there, or whatever have you, you know, like that that dynamic happens in any industry. It is not novel. And You can be part of that, right? Like you can create that sort of thing in your software business as an educator, and I hate to use the word as a thought leader, right?

Yeah, yeah.

God, I’m going to post this in the show notes. It is one of my absolute favorite things that I’ve seen in any small business. So, the Violet Hour, all right. Very, very like world-famous cocktail bar in Wicker Park in Chicago. And they’re fantastic. I’ve never had a bad night there. It’s hard to get a table sometimes. And their cocktails are a little pricey as they should be for a world famous cocktail bar. They were like one of the first ever cocktail bars in the city. And they’re still going. They’re fantastic. I love them to death. Toby Maloney is the owner of the Violet Hour. And somebody posted to LTH forum, which is a like PHP BB forum for foodies in the city. One of my absolute favorite sites to get recommendations and how I’m able to say, like, this is the best X in the city, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody goes on there and says, Hey, I tried out making, I think it was an Iron Cross or Juliet and Romeo, one of the cocktails from Violet Hour. It was classic, one of their like big, famous ones. How do y’all think I did? And he was asking like the other patrons of the forum. And the next reply is from Toby Maloney, and it’s his first post on the site. He registered an account and immediately replied back. He was like, This was really good. You did a great job with this. You missed only these things. Here’s the entire recipe that you need. I really appreciate this one modification. I’m going to go and try it at home tonight and see how it works. Next post. I tried it, it’s really good. Do you mind if we integrate it into the bar? And he’s like, No, go right ahead. It’s like, by the way, while I’m here, does anybody have any requests for violet hour recipes? It’s not the same as actually going there and having somebody make it for you and clean the glassware after you’re done and bust everything, but you know, you can do this at home. And we’ll do everything for you that’s not a bitters recipe. Because if you know, like classic cocktail bars, bitters recipes are often dozens, if not hundreds, of botanicals and extremely complicated and difficult to make, and very guarded secrets. But I’ll give you everything except for the bitters. And of course, like you know, like a flood of comments in make me this, this, this. He starts listing all the recipes from the violet hour. But the two conditions, he said, I’ll give you the recipe. You have to try it at home. You have to photograph it. Tell me how it went and what you would change in it. And this is open source software basically applied to cocktails. It was incredible. And it went on for like 40 pages on this dumb PHPBB site. It was incredible. This happened maybe seven or eight years ago. I still refer to it. It has made me a better bartender at home. It has made me more thoughtful about Mixing cocktails in general. And it came in the form of this, right? So, Toby, I think why you asked me to talk about this. All of that is the freebie offering. We’ve talked in the past about the Alinia cookbook and how that served as the way to get me in the door to Alinya, right? It proves he is a kind and generous person, above all, and really interested in geeking out about ice content and other stuff like that, right? To a bunch of other geeks, because LTH form is all nerds. All nerds. But it also shows that the recipe isn’t the thing, it’s the execution of the recipe.

Yeah, because you can make it at home, but I tell you, man, it ain’t the violet hour, which is a gorgeous space. It is incredible, right? And Kai, you and I have been to fancy cocktail bars before. It’s not unlike the one we went to together in Philadelphia. It’s not unlike the one that. We went to a couple years ago. Like, I’ve taken you to some amazing spaces. And we sat there, asked for the thing, and got the thing. And we got to sit in a neutral territory, which is ambiance. And, like, there’s value to both of those things. So, the point being about all of this. Do not be afraid to be generous. Do not be afraid to give away the keys to the Corolla because you know how to drive it. They don’t.

I’m going to end with a quote from Toby on this post. Bars like the Violet Hour are constantly evolving entities. They change with the seasons, putting out four menus a year. The drinks have also become more sophisticated over time. The new summer menu has incorporated many more esoteric ingredients than the first summer menu. We are going through more eggs, more amari, and bitters than we did a year ago. So there is growth of both the bar and the patrons, usually at the same rate. This is how we are engaged with the customer over the long haul.