I was just listening to Chris Garrett talk to Sonia Simone on a seminar about overcoming analysis paralysis, and Chris was talking about the difficulty of eating an entire elephant, and he’s got this Liverpool accent, so it was totally charming and amusing to my American ears, and I was even able to forget that he was talking about butchering elephants. That’s how intriguing it was.

By “trying to eat a whole elephant,” I’m of course talking about “trying to figure out the enormity of the tasks surrounding how the hell I’m going to start or advance my business.” This applies even for non-pachyderm-related lines of work.

I’ve been chatting with a lot of folks lately, and it seems like everyone is perplexed by the elephant on the table in front of them when they sit down at the table of internet commerce. Frankly, they’re stymied by just how damn huge it is. I mean, forget the salad. Forget the appetizer. Forget the rolls. Just bring a bib and some Wet Ones, because this task will take everything we have.

I want to talk about how you can actually eat that elephant. It’s really obvious, and it’s the kind of simpleton advice you’ll want to hit me with a pie for offering.

But first, let’s survey the scene.

I’m going to make a crazy guess here and say that a large percentage of you out there in IttyBiz Land have yet to start your IttyBiz, or have maybe started it but then kind of stalled.

(Maybe Naomi knows the stats on this, but my guess is that she doesn’t. My further guess is that she won’t even read this post before running it; I’m going to test this theory by adding a few semicolons because she hates semicolons and would take them out if she read it; she has one tattooed on her back; it was a mistake.) (Naomi’s note: FYI? Totally noticed.)

If you’re one of those supposed many who want to start your biz but haven’t, what’s the reason? Because there’s too much to know, too much to understand. There’s this huge business elephant in front of you (maybe in a suit… it is a business elephant, after all) and you know you’ll never get through it all — so there doesn’t seem to be any point to starting.

And dude… I get it. I’ve been there. Not in my current business iteration (I was scared shitless and was working like mad when Johnny B. Truant, Inc. launched in order to outrun the reaper, so I didn’t have time for analysis paralysis) but I’ve suffered elephant-related stalling many times elsewhere in my life. It’s happened with things I’m doing now, too. I mean, I avoided doing audio and video the correct way because there was too much to it. Too many moving parts. It was too big of a monster, and I didn’t have the time to tackle it. And hell, I didn’t have a fucking clue where to start anyway, and so I just kind of did nothing. I went without A/V when I could, and had to rely on others to do it for me when it was required.

So if you’re stuck, I understand — but you can’t let overwhelm stop you from moving on in whatever way you’re able. Which is where we return to Chris and his elephant.

As I was listening to Chris taawking about aiting the whooole ellie-fant, I realized how I’ve gotten through that in the past. And the solution — as is often the case in situations of discovering the profound — is not at all groundbreaking. It’s so incredibly obvious that you want to hit yourself in the face with a pie for not seeing it earlier and acting accordingly.

How do you eat an elephant? All together, class: ONE BITE AT A TIME.

Which means that you’ll start in one area and ignore the rest until that one area is kind of handled. You don’t have to know how you’ll finish the trunk while you’re working on the ass. Just worry about the ass for now. Remember that always in business, folks: Just worry about the ass.

You aren’t going to know how the moving parts of your business will eventually work together when you start out.

You aren’t going to know which logo colors are the right ones.

You aren’t going to know whether you should create this product or the other.

You aren’t going to know which topic area is the right one, or what your writing voice should sound like.

You aren’t going to understand how to keep your books, how to track sales, how to work the membership software, or what the hell a PayPal mass payment is. (Naomi’s note: Not that Johnny would know anything about that.)

You are NOT GOING TO KNOW this stuff.

You’re have to just start eating that elephant without knowing how you’ll ever finish it. Without having any idea which parts you should attack next.

You’re going to try one thing, and you’re going to totally fuck it up. You’ll (for instance) not understand that PayPal mass payment thing and will pay your affiliates the normal PayPal way, and they’ll be charged a fee on their commissions, and they’ll be pissed at you, and you’ll be embarrassed.

So you’ll learn, and you’ll do it right the next time.

You’re going to realize only at the end of the year that there was a simple thing you could have done to track your income and expenses over the course of a zillion tiny online transactions. You’ll realize that although you could have done that one thing, you didn’t… and that now, your taxes will now take you two full weeks to complete.

But you’ll learn, and you’ll do it right the next time.

Or you’ll hire help to get you over your rough spots. And that means you’ll spend money (or not — sometimes the best things in life really are free), but you’ll become more efficient bit by bit. And you’ll learn what works, one bite at a time.

It’s amazing how many people get hung up on this. I see it all the time with clients, and every once in a while I see it in myself. But the answer is always the same: If there’s something you should be doing that you’re not doing because it seems too big and too complicated (and like you’ll never figure it out before you start), you’re right.

You’ll never figure it out before you start. So stop trying.

Just do the damn thing. Start eating the elephant one bite at a time. Make your mistakes. Always look to adjust little aspects of what you do as you go. Always look for ways to learn and improve.

You don’t have to get it right. You only have to always be doing it better.

And now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk of elephants has made me really hungry.

P.S: I can help you with the first part of that elephant. I’m doing a free WordPress blog setup promotion right now that ends on Friday, so you can cross “figure out how to set up blog” off of your elephant list.

——

Johnny B. Truant blogs at JohnnyBTruant.com and is one of the two guys behind The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions. (Naomi’s note: Betcha can’t guess who the other guy is.)

So if you weren’t reading IttyBiz a year ago, let me give you the brief version of what happened here circa April 2009:

1. I said, “Hey, Naomi… I’ve never made a cent online, so why don’t I be your guinea pig to prove that it can be done by an average Joe?”
2. Naomi smoked several cigarettes.
3. Over the next few months, Naomi and her now-unavailable Online Business School course coached me through starting my own internet business.
4. I did pretty well under said tutelage, thus proving that IttyBiz shit is so awesome that it should always wear David Lee Roth’s old spandex from the Van Halen days.
5. Naomi smoked several cigarettes.

So every now and again, I’ll check in and let IttyBiz readers know how awesome IttyBiz shit is, and what I’ve learned from it that you might borrow from my experience and apply to your own.

And then I realize how long a year is in internet time, and realize that The Johnny Project probably isn’t as relevant as it used to be — at least as it pertains to Johnny B. Truant, who is perhaps a bit overexposed in some circles nowadays.

The point is, it’s been a year, and Naomi and her IttyBiz advice saved my ass from certain peril (my ass’s real estate investments were tanking, and the clients my ass used to work for all either went out of business or stopped using my ass), and so I’m here to say officially that this little experiment worked, and that A NEWBIE CAN APPARENTLY BUILD A BUSINESS ONLINE, AND THAT ITTYBIZ ADVICE IS THE SHIT.

Quid pro quo.

Which is a Latin term that doesn’t mean “thus it is proven,” but I’m far too lazy to look up the right expression and maybe you won’t notice anyway.

(A bunch of nerds just hopped down to the comment box to tell me the right expression. Betcha anything there were like twenty of them.)

So yeah. I figured it’d be cool to cap this experiment off with some of my most relevant lessons learned.

Lesson #1: Stupid amounts of stubborn persistence are key.

I wrote in Johnny Talks About Motivation that the reason I was able to build a successful internet business was because I was willing to just keep trying different approaches until something worked.

I also suggested that if this incarnation of my business hadn’t worked, I’d still be trying new things today… you know, until something finally did work.

And so, I think that the number one rule for success is this: Keep at it.

You may not know my history prior to forming this current business: My old, dead website business. My expired gig writing for a human resources magazine. My colossal failure as a real estate investor. Countless dead ends using AdSense and affiliate arbitrage schemes when starting online. To put it succinctly, I have many more business failures than business successes.

It may look like I tried something and it worked, but that’s only because you haven’t been watching while I was doing the dozens of things over the past decade that didn’t work.

So the message again is to always keep at it, until it works for you.

Lesson #2: Start now, and figure out what you’re doing later.

My friend Charlie Gilkey calls this “learning to fly the plane while it’s in the air.” My JV partner Lee Stranahan gives the punk analogy in the punk rock, DIY entrepreneurship course we’re launching very soon: Form the band first, and then learn to play instruments second.

I run into people all the time who want to get their website or their plan or their message or their voice just right before they do anything. But in my experience, you have to just start. You’ll find your writing voice as you write. You’ll hone your services as you do them for clients. You’ll find your correct price point as you work. You’ll discover your best niche as you go along.

Remember: This is the internet, where things are fluid. If you go in one direction and it sucks, just go in another.

Some people will see the switch and will say, “Isn’t she the person who used to… ” but anyone who finds you after the switch will simply know you as a person who does Y and not know or care that you ever did X.

If you raise a price from $50 to $100, some people will notice that the prices went up, but new people will simply see you as a $100 person, making the $50 price irrelevant.

Launch the website now. Start doing something now. Then, hone your approach as you go along.

Lesson #3: This takes balls.

Doing your own thing is fucking scary. It was easier for me because I had been self-employed even before starting my current business, but for most people, the biggest “skill” to cultivate, in my opinion, is guts.

Afraid to put yourself out there? Afraid to say, “I’m charging $X” and not lower your prices unless you have a very good reason? Afraid to be creative and risk criticism? Afraid to not knowing when your next paycheck may come, or where it may come from? Afraid of the many obstacles you think are in your path?

All of that is normal, and all understandable. You can be afraid sometimes, but if you’re to succeed, you have to have the balls to forge ahead anyway — no matter how scary it may get.

Lesson #4: This is really, really hard work.

There’s a widespread perception that starting your own business will mean increased leisure time. This is really far from the truth… at least at first.

I think this perception comes up because “starting your own business” = “doing your own thing,” and furthermore that “doing your own thing” = “doing what you enjoy,” and therefore that “doing what you enjoy” = “laying on the couch, watching Star Trek and eating bon-bons.”

I do my own thing, and I mostly enjoy what I’m doing. I do not, however, spend much time watching Star Trek or eating bon-bons. You can do that as an entrepreneur if you want to pioneer the field of being broke off your ass and getting kicked out of your apartment, but that aspiration seldom appears in mission statements.

During the first months, I put in 18 hour days. You may not have to work as a solopreneur… but if you don’t work, nobody is going to pay you.

Add to that the fact that you’re trying to build something, not just maintain it. Maybe right now, you can rustle up $500 per month in odd self-employement type jobs in your field — but you don’t want to make $6k per year; you want to make $60k. That means that you’ll do the $500 worth of work, but will also have to do a lot of shit that you won’t get paid for in the interest of generating new leads, opening new channels, building new products, etc.

Every month, I write 4-10 posts for my own blog, 6-8 posts for other blogs, answer a ton of chatty or question-laced emails, spend a ton of time on Twitter, hone existing product design and copy, have at least one new project in development, follow up with leads, and on and on and on. I get paid for none of that directly.

This past month, I’ve been working with Lee on that new course I mentioned. It’s around 8 hours of our own content, plus like a dozen guest interviews, plus copy to go with it, plus the sales letter, graphics, cart and mailing list admin, etc. The time input needed to do all of that has been ridiculous.

If the launch goes well, it’ll totally be worth it… but the fact remains that what any entrepreneur does is NOT easy. Enjoyable as it may sometimes be and as free as you may sometimes feel, this is hard work.

Lesson #5: Don’t be normal.

I’ve saved the best for last. If you’re reading this, you are not a normal person. Normal people do what the default path says they should. Normal people get jobs. Normal people have 2.5 kids and live in a house with a white picket fence.

You may have the kids and house and fence, or you may not. But if you read IttyBiz, you are either doing your own thing, or wish you could. And that’s not normal.

The problem is that if you’re not normal, the rules, judgments, and benchmarks of normal society don’t apply to you. So if you’re weird and aren’t truly embracing it, you’re going to be confused; you’re going to feel alone and like a total outsider; you’re going to wonder why people think your ideas are crazy, naive, or stupid.

You’re a rebel. You’re punk rock. I’ve come to believe this so firmly lately that it became the centerpiece of the Question the Rules course. Entrepreneurs defy convention, and need to learn how find some guidance while they’re all busy not following rules and guidance. We all need to find a way to stop thinking about societal plans and instead learn the tools needed to create our own plans.

That’s how you go from simply being “not normal” to what we might call “not normal with a purpose.” It’s how you go from being just “that weirdo” to “that weirdo who’s crazy all the way to the bank.” (Read: Naomi.)

So that’s it. That’s the story of Year One, and those are the most poignant lessons learned by the guy who had never made a cent online prior to Year One.

So rock on for yourself in general, and rock the lessons above if you dare. You fucking weirdo.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is one of the creators of Question the Rules: The Nonconformist’s Punk Rock, DIY, Nuts-And-Bolts Guide To Creating The Business And Life You Really Want, Starting With What You Already Have, a badass new course which will launch on April 28th.

And at the same time, the most recent post on my blog was a rerun of last year’s “Christmas is Gay.”

Of course, that just seemed like an anomaly, so I looked back.

The post before that was “Cash is King,” about how I’m not going to use credit anymore and will buy literally everything with cash from here on out.

Before that was “How to be Awesome,” then “The Most Awesomest Christmas Post Ever” (in which I theorize that Jesus’s birthday parties must be at the coolest McDonald’s PlayPlace in the universe), and then “Why Arnold Schwarzenegger Would Fuck You Up.”

And, to review: I make my living by consulting and setting up WordPress blogs. Makes sense, right?

I didn’t plan things this way. I didn’t plan to blog about nothing that has any relationship whatsoever to what I do. It’s not like I sat down with a pen and paper and said, “Okay, I’ll write dick jokes to enhance my ability to sell technology services.” And not only did I not plan it — I, in fact, didn’t even realize that I’d been doing it.

So that forced some soul searching. And of course, I had to ask my mentor, Ms. Naomi, about it when we all got together to record the January call for this little thing I’m part of with Charlie Gilkey and others called The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions.

And her answer was that for whatever reason, the strange things I do and write about makes people like me.

And then, when those same people need a blog, they don’t go to Google to find a web guru. Instead, they go to the guy they already know and like.

“Sometimes, it’s just about showing up and being cool,” she said.

And then she devolved into a volley of animal noises and swearing and vomiting, and Charlie and I had to call the Canadian police to check up on her. (The Canadian police are just like the American police except that they wear hats with ear flaps and carry geese.)

But, yeah. Sometimes it’s just about showing up and being cool. Which made sense, and was really very encouraging and badass, because not only is that strategy more fun than “working at marketing and branding,” but it’s also a hell of a lot more natural. And none of this should shock me, because in these past 9-10 months that feel like 16 years, it all keeps coming back to the same basic principles — what I’m coming to think of as “The Third Tribe Way.”

• Be a real and genuine person in business
• Cut through the bullshitty normal internet marketing techniques
• Don’t hide your personal flaws and weaknesses
• Show up and be cool

None of which sounds like what you’d hear in just about any marketing course, but all of which has been essential for what I’ve done, and what I tell my consulting clients to do.

Thinking about positioning and building a list and your tone of communication is hard. Being a real person and letting those things happen more organically allows those things to flow a hell of a lot easier.

So I thought about it more. What exactly is my plan, insofar as I have one? (Which I don’t.)

If I had to outline my branding and marketing strategy as a whole, I’d first give the caveat that it’s hardly a strategy and that it just seems to be what works for me, and then I’d give the following:

1. Have good services that are well-defined, that there’s a demand for, and that are backed by social proof.

This one is obvious. Everyone does it. It’s not always easy, and it takes time, and it takes effort, but everyone knows to do it. You have to offer services that people actually want. You have to be good at what you do, and to have some testimonials from folks who will confirm that you are, in fact, good at what you do, and that you’re not a flaming asshole. Define your services, and explain the benefits to your clients of using them.

But then most people stop there and run off into some internet marketing douchebaggery with yellow-highlighted type and a zillion aWeber autoresponse messages. I prefer a different, nonsensical tack that nonetheless works for some reason:

2. Write my own stupid-ass posts on my stupid-ass blog about whatever the hell I want.

Someone pointed out to me the other day that it’s important to be smart in these posts and to manage to be somehow likable, but rules beyond that don’t seem to apply very much. I pretty much literally write about whatever strikes me. Sometimes that’s businessy and motivational stuff, but often it’s things like a pair of turkeys that took up residence in my barn. I never write about WordPress tips and techniques any more, or anything else that might help to establish my credibility as a WordPress guy, or even as a consultant.

3. Interact on the Web.

For me, this has mainly been on Twitter, but for others it’s on Facebook, in forums, in the comments of other blogs, via email, whatever. I just try to get to know people out there in InternetLand. I try not to talk about my services all the time. Most of what I write in these venues is stupid shit that has nothing to do with anything.

#2 and #3 above comprise the “just show up and be cool” part of the plan, and they are essential.

4. Be an authority on other blogs with bigger audiences, for exposure.

You see me write a lot of guest posts. As long as they’ll let me do it, I’ll keep shooting regular posts to IttyBiz, Copyblogger, Problogger, Project Mojave, and others. I don’t do this for fun, although they’re all run by fun folks and I do like writing for them. I do it because it puts me in front of a hell of a lot of people.

Because other blogs aren’t as half-assed as I my own, guest posts are an opportunity for me to actually write about something — specifically, about the topic of the blog I’m guest posting on. This is where I get to talk about how to improve your business or be more trustable, or whatever. So I’m kind of forced to be coherent — which is good, because I’m not always coherent on my own blog, and “coherent” is sort of required sometimes.

But here’s the thing: #4 is absolutely a keystone strategy for me. I’m not saying it would work for everyone, but I won’t do without it. I take it as seriously as building sites for clients. If I get behind on my guest posting, I get nervous and start writing ASAP.

Basically, guest posting on blogs larger than your own (or even just different from your own) gives you a chance to “show up and be cool” in front of a bunch of people who you couldn’t otherwise reach to be cool in front of.

This whole thing is very strange, and very counterintuitive to most people I consult with. I get it. It’s strange to me too.

If I had to sum up the JBT strategy for generating leads in a nutshell, it’d be this: Get out there. Meet people. Make friends with them. Wait for them to have work for you. The more people you can make friends with, the better the numbers get, and the more you can then implement the other things I talk about, like building rapport and trust, generating referrals, and knowing your own value enough to raise your prices.

This whole thing may not be your style, and I’m not saying that anyone should copy it, but maybe it’s just one more arrow to put in your quiver. One more thing to try out. I mean, how can it hurt to show up and be cool? It can’t. Not unless your specialty is being a giant asshole.

And by the way, don’t be cool if you’re selling asshole services. But I have to figure that’s less than 10% of you anyway, so it’s all good.

—-
Johnny B. Truant is the fellow who, in nine months, used IttyBiz advice to go from never having made a cent online to a five-figure-monthly internet business. If you’d like him to help you with your own online mojo, you should totally hire him to coach you. He promises not to speak in third-person like this during your sessions.

What I’m doing this time is scary on a mental level. Specifically, I’ve decided to raise my prices. Starting in 2010, this here guy with an apple is going to be more expensive to work with.

Setting prices — and especially upping prices — is an interesting quandary for any fledgling business. When I realized I’d be raising the bar at JBT, Inc., I went through a range of emotions. First I was excited, then nervous, then tired, then giddy, then mentally deficient, then largely reticulated. Then I figured I should write about it for IttyBiz, because IttyBiz readers have faced or will eventually face the same issue.

And also, December is eggnog season. And you know it’s going to get sloppy around this blog when eggnog season really kicks in. If I don’t contribute something and Naomi is the only person writing this month, you’re going to get only scrawled versus of “Louie Louie” and drunken rants about the prime-time superhunks.

So yeah. Let me tell you what’s been going on.

2010 means a lot of things. It’s two years before the apocalypse and it’s the year we do the second set of events surrounding that giant monolith that NASA apparently found near Jupiter’s moon Io — the monolith that makes apes smart and gave birth to that big space baby thing. The dawn of 2010 also marks the end of the first partial year of the Johnny B. Truant biz, AKA “Naomi’s big gamble.”

And, I’m happy to report that with four months remaining before I can say I’ve been doing the Johnny biz for a full year, things are going smashingly well.

They’re going so well, in fact, that if you send me an email, I’ll sometimes take a week to respond. (If you contact me with a job, however, I’m much faster because I like money.) Things are going so well that in the evenings, I sit in front of the TV until 10:30pm or so with my laptop on my lap, trying to catch up on loose ends. Things are, in fact, going so well that I hired an assistant (kind of). I mean, I manage to get to the gym and I manage to spend time with my family, but things are going so well that it’s stupid-crazy around here.

Not that I’m complaining — especially in this economic day and age. But all the same, wouldn’t it be cool if I remembered what reading a book felt like? Because Stephen King has a new one out, and it looks way cool.

Every successful IttyBiz will get to this point eventually, so listen up if you plan to be successful. I’m going to say some stuff now to try and convince myself that it’s true, so on the off chance that I’m correct, maybe it’ll be instructional for some of you, too.

(And if I am correct about this stuff, someone tell me, because I only know it in theory, not from experience. Kind of like how I know that in theory, The English Patient was supposed to be a masterpiece, but in my experience, it was a big piece of shit.)

Anyway. The part with the subheads and the axioms.

Business principle # 402432: When your docket gets full, raise your prices. Like always, unless you’re a big pussy.

The ballsiest version of this goes, “… DOUBLE your prices.”

I’ve heard this again and again, but it’s easier said than done. The theory goes something like this: If you spend 10 hours doing work at $25/hour, that’s $250. If you raise your prices to $50/hour, you’ll be able to make that same $250 by working only 5 hours. And if people love what you do so much that they still clamor to pay the doubled prices and you find that you’re still booking 10 hours, then congratulations: You’ve doubled your income.

And actually, if that happens, I believe you’re then supposed to double your prices again. Double until you have some room on your calendar. The idea is to dissuade all but the people who really, really want to work with you. You gain time and you gain money. Good stuff.

But as someone who has never really ventured a dramatic price increase, this is all kind of scary. I think it’s probably scary to all who attempt it. Here’s what a typical person will find themselves thinking:

1. What if I raise my prices and lose all of my clients? i.e., what if I can command X customers at rates of $Y, but can’t command even half that number of clients at rates of double-Y? Then I’ll actually be making less. And that’s not cool.

2. Do these pants make me look fat?

But you know what I’m realizing? Even with the doubts and questions, you’ve gotta do it. Maybe you don’t have to double your prices, but they have to go up when you get booked. It’s part of believing in your own value — and your value (as well as the perception thereof) — is part of the reason that people are coming to you in the first place.

When you’re a one-person shop, it’s scary to rock the boat. This is why people waffle on hiring employees or an assistant — they understand the principle, but secretly doubt that they can make enough money to pay for the help.

Similarly, when you’re an ittybiz, it’s easy to rationalize that yeah, you’re fully booked and yeah, you’re pulling your hair out because you’re working every second, but yeah, it’s working and you’re happy with your income and, shit, most people would be delighted to have your “problem” of having too much work.

So you sort of think, I’ll just keep working 25 hours a day at my current rates. I’ll manage somehow.

Yeah, fail. Don’t do that.

I know it’s freaky, but you need to give yourself some breathing room. If you’re that booked, you’re in significant demand. And if you’re that booked, you can (and should) raise your rates. True, you’ll lose some jobs. But you won’t lose enough to offset the gain you make from the higher prices you’re commanding from the clients who stay with you.

So here’s maybe a good progression to follow. It’s kind of a to-do flow chart. Follow it and you’ll be okay, believing and progressing slowly.

1. Wait until a potential job shows up that you don’t want to do for some reason. Maybe it’s a shit job, or maybe it’s a really hard job, or maybe it’s just something that won’t fit into your calendar.

2. Quote a stupidly high price for that job. Like double what you’d normally quote. Because remember, you don’t want to do it anyway.

3. If that job goes away, cool — because you didn’t want it. And if the client agrees to the price, then yeah, you have to do the job. But so fucking what, because you’re getting overpaid to do it. And also, congratulations — you’ve just discovered the true value of that job. It’s higher than you thought it was.

4. Repeat with the next job you don’t want to do.

5. If you keep getting refusals on these stupidly high quotes, stop here and do not raise prices.

6. If, however, clients keep agreeing to these higher quotes, you’ll start to realize that you’re actually not over-quoting for those jobs. The truth is that you’ve been under-quoting for your other jobs. You now have permission to start believing in yourself more.

7. Once it feels like you have consensus — and once you’re totally booked and over-busy anyway — then go ahead and raise those prices. Cross your fingers beforehand.

Yeah, I agree — it’s freaky. And in my own adventure, there’s a part of me that says, “Dude, don’t raise your prices when 2010 rolls around. Sure, you’re overbooked. But what if higher rates make everyone bail?”

Then this other part of me is like, “Dude, chill. You’ve gone through the 7-step process. The value you’re providing is higher than you think it is.”

And then this third part of me is like, “Dude, where’s the weed at?”

(Kidding. I don’t smoke weed, but my mind does often sound like a stoner party. I blame my frequent munchies on it.)

I don’t have a conclusion to this chapter of my business yet, so it’d be cool if some of you who have done this could offer your experiences. Because there’s a lot more to be said about this that I simply don’t have experience enough to share.

I hereby wish myself good luck. Good luck, Johnny.

(Naomi’s Note: Johnny wasn’t going to include this paragraph but I told him he wouldn’t be worthy of calling himself my protege if he did not. Then we got into a fist fight and I’m just writing it myself. If, for some ungodly reason, you want to send Johnny some money, December is the last month to hire him at his current rates. If you’d like to work with him on anything (maybe building a blog or website, or maybe his surprisingly popular consulting which has some new raving fans), now would be a good time. Just drop him a line at johnny@johnnybtruant.com if you have questions or anything.)

When I started my first blog just over a year ago, I spent forever tweaking it and trying to make it perfect. Eventually I just launched the damn thing, but there were plenty of aspects of the site that I didn’t like: The sidebars didn’t have all of my best “callout” items in them, so that people would be certain to see them. My newsletter subscription offer wasn’t strong enough. It took me forever to make the background look right and match perfectly where it met the footer, and I never did get it right. I didn’t like my old “Hire Johnny” page, and I had meant to organize my categories better.

Of course, none of that matters now, because that site — TheEconomyIsntHappening.com — is gone. I consolidated the content from the old TEIH and combined it with the content from the site I launched while IttyBiz watched, which was LearnToBeYourOwnVA.com. That site is gone now too, and both live harmoniously under the new umbrella of JohnnyBTruant.com.

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting lately (and by the way, there’s plenty I don’t like about that page, too — it makes it look like I only consult about technology, which isn’t true), and one thing I keep running into are people like me — people who are creating something and want it to be perfect right out of the starting gate. I try to explain what I can’t even make myself believe, but it’s a hard thing to put into words. Why shouldn’t you make your site perfect, after all?

But Charlie nailed it. He said that no matter what you’re doing online, it’ll be obsolete in a few months. Not obsolete in the way VHS tapes are obsolete, but obsolete because you’ve changed. Your business has changed; your voice has changed; your whole “thing” online has evolved. And that’s exactly what happened to me, and it’s why those little imperfections on the old TheEconomyIsntHappening.com ended up not mattering.

What was more important was to soldier on imperfectly, rather than to wait for everything to be “just right.”

Let me put this another way: In my experience, if you want to do business online, you’re going to have to be willing to do your thing to the best of your ability even if it doesn’t feel like you’ve defined yourself and your value proposition and your website perfectly enough yet. You’re going to have to accept that the way you’re doing things in six months may well be totally different from the way you’re doing them now. You’ll need to realize that just because you’re writing about how much you love explosive pies today, you may be organizing courses to train explosive pie disposal units in half a year. That has to be okay with you. You have to go with your gut, and go where the market seems to be taking you. You have to let your voice and your method of operation evolve with time.

What Charlie was suggesting is that there’s no point in trying to be perfect because “YOU” online is sort of a moving target anyway. That’s what I try to tell my clients who want to spend three months crafting the perfect look for their first website. Especially when starting out, YOU don’t know who YOU are anyway. You’ll create this perfect, expensive, time-consuming site to match who you think you are online, and a few months later you’ll realize you were wrong, and your site doesn’t match who you’ve become.

I figured it might make sense to talk about why I ditched my old websites and launched the new one, since this series is supposed to be about how a n00b online businessman grew his business. So here’s that story.

When you first met me, I had TheEconomyIsntHappening.com. For all intents and purposes, it was a strict humor blog. Humor sucks as a profession. You get to spend a ton of time crafting perfect copy, and if you’re lucky, you can make upwards of five dollars a month doing it. I then created TheDiabeticWeightlifter.com as my IttyBiz project (still live, but hasn’t been updated in forever), but then quickly decided to launch LearnToBeYourOwnVA.com when, during the course of explaining how I launched the weightlifter site, a bunch of people said they wanted to know about how to launch sites.

That felt like as good of a quorum as any. So I wrote my free eBook, took off on the V.A. site, filled it with tips, tutorials, and an initial round of webinars, and decided I’d found my niche, which I could ride and build forever. For kicks, I kept writing my humor blog as well.

Then Charlie’s “few months later” hit, and I realized that both of those sites were outdated. I wasn’t going in the correct direction for either of them anymore.

For one, I’d started writing a lot for other blogs. IttyBiz was one, but Copyblogger and Problogger were two more. I wrote a few times for Tim Brownson, and got involved with Project Mojave. I started to get into this Third Tribe mindset, and things like ethical business and trust were on my mind all the time. Where was I supposed to write about those things? On my “technical tips” blog? Or on my humor blog?

I asked my readers what they thought. I weighed it all long and hard in my own mind. And eventually I could only throw my hands in the air and decide to ditch both the tech tips direction and the pure humor direction, and see if “Johnny B. Truant” was strong enough yet to fly as a brand on its own.

And so here I am, less than a year after making my first cent in an online business, and I’ve already changed my business model a few times. I’ve already scrapped two sites and forged a third. I’ve already had to figure out whether “humor” or “building websites” or “Johnny B. Truant” was a better horse to put my money on.

So I guess the takeaway is, Don’t get too wedded to your current way of doing business. Don’t wait until you have everything perfect before you start your site, because you’re chasing something that’s evolving. Just get going. Just launch already, and clean up the loose ends, and accept that you may have to completely re-do all of it a few months down the road anyway. The nature of the Net is that you’ll try one thing, listen to your audience’s response, and subtly adjust. You may think you know exactly what you’re going to do, but you may not. Your voice will change; your specialty will change; your style will change. You’ll start by offering X, but then discover that Y fits you better and is an easier sale anyway.

And by the way, I doubt I’ve figured it all out now. I’ll bet that in another six months, JohnnyBTruant.com will get a serious overhaul. I’ll bet I’ll be doing things then that I can’t predict today.

So don’t wait to perfect what you’re about to do. Do it now, imperfectly. And once you’ve done it, don’t be rigid and wedded to it. Accept that it will evolve, and change, and grow.

I know it’s all very confusing by nature, but the way you’re supposed to reframe that is as an adventure. So just keep telling yourself that.

—-

Want more Charlie? Charlie Gilkey and I are launching a twice-monthly call series called The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions, which will debut shortly. One of us will try to be drunk most times, or to get our guests drunk.

A young man hears about a master living high in the mountains, near a large blue lake and a crystal stream, who teaches… I don’t know… kung fu, I guess. Like, this guy is the most super awesome kung fu guy in the world and everyone wants to learn from him because he can catch flies with chopsticks and dodge bullets and become, like, invisible and shit. I mean, he’s better than David Carradine and Remo Williams put together.

So this kid goes up to see the master and the master is wading in a stream or something, and the kid says, “I want to learn kung fu from you.” And the master says, “Fuck off, kid, I’m fishing. You don’t really want to learn from me.”

So the kid leaves. Meditates on the whole thing a bit. Studies more kung fu. Watches The Karate Kid, even though it’s about karate. Gets all mad at the evil sensei who wants that blond kid to sweep Daniel-San’s broken leg at the end.

He goes back to the master and says, “Master, I really, really, really want to learn kung fu from you.” And the master is still in the stream up to his ass with one of those floating live bait things next to him and he looks up and says, “Dude, you don’t want it badly enough. And you didn’t even bring me any donuts.”

So the kid goes back. Works harder. Learns more. Watches the rest of the Karate Kid movies and even some Steven Segal movies. Watches Hard to Kill, decides that even though it’s hard, he wants it badly enough to kill Segal anyway. Meditates on his passion for kung fu. Makes long lists of why he wants to learn from the master. Hires a debate coach to form airtight arguments for why he really, really wants to learn kung fu. Studies neurolinguistic programming. Then he hikes up the mountain again, this time with a giant box of donuts for the master and a few hundred dollars of strip club funny money inside of a singing Hallmark card with a bow on it.

Again the master is in the river when he arrives, and he looks up and says, “Oh, Christ. Not you again.”

So the kid goes into his reasons why he really really wants to learn, pulls out all the stops, uses his NLP techniques and matches and models the master’s body language, uses his sales training to work on a hard sell, gives him the Benjamin Franklin close technique, and the master rolls his eyes, grabs the kid by the face, shoves his head under the water, and holds it there.

The kid starts to push up, but the master holds him down. So the kid pushes with his legs. Thrashes. Kicks. Starts to panic, punches at the master, tries to swim out, claws, scratches, grabs rocks and tries to brain the old guy with them. Finally he manages to grab a branch off of the shore and beats the master with it and finally, panting, emerges and staggers back.

“You don’t want badly enough to learn from me,” says the master. “Go home. Then, when you want to learn as badly as you wanted to breathe just now, come back and we’ll talk.”

See, this is the element of the last six months of “The Johnny OBS Project” that I can never accurately convey no matter how hard I try. I can write about what I did, and try my best to explain to you fine folks exactly the steps I took to go from zilch to over $6k per month in half a year.

I can tell you about my attitude, my mindset, my philosophies on branding your personality, giving back, and my thoughts on being genuinely cool instead of being a dick. But what I can’t explain to someone who has never experienced it is the drive behind it all.

Let’s look at where I was in late March of this year.

It was a tense time. I owned around fifteen rental properties, and only one of them was a good investment. I was essentially the sole breadwinner for a family of four. I had three major clients, and all were in jeopardy. One was using me less due to the economy, one was in the process of being sold to someone who wouldn’t use me, and one was tanking. All three of those “bad client things” eventually went to completion, and led quickly to me billing none of them anything at all.

I had to do whatever it took or it would mean financial ruin. Maybe bankruptcy. It’s not dying in a ditch, but it’s not fun either. I was the kid being held under the water, and I was going to do whatever it took to survive.

It was bad. It actually freaked Naomi out, because I was so desperate. I’d ask her questions like, “How long will this take to make money?” and “Can I try this one thing yet? Okay, how about now?” I had to make myself back off lest I give her a panic attack. But, when I was alone, I filled every minute with my pursuit of… of whatever. It started with the niche websites; I spent every night writing keyword-filled articles, launching new blogs, reading new material, Stumbling and Digging my own stuff, making Squidoo lenses and Hubspot hubs, writing articles for the article directories and linking them back to my stuff, tweaking AdSense, trying AdWords.

I wrote my non-niche blogs, contacted other bloggers, sought out guest posting spots, joined forums and networking groups, surfed directories, crunched my Analytics data, refined my sites, bugged Naomi every minute, wrote e-books, Googled for new material, went through the Thirty Day Challenge in two weeks.

I once heard Tony Robbins say this thing where he asks, “How long would you give your average toddler to learn to walk before you gave up and stopped him from trying?” And the answer of course is that if the kid is able-bodied, you never stop; the kid keeps trying until it happens. And it’s no wonder that just about everyone in the world who is able to walk does so. That was me. How long was I going to keep at it? As long as it took.

I woke up every day at 6am and would work until 11pm. I’d take maybe 2-4 hours per day on average to eat, go to the gym, hang out with my family. Seven days a week during most weeks.

It didn’t feel like work I needed to do. It felt like thrashing under the surface, doing whatever was necessary to get up for air. I wasn’t panicked all the time, but I knew it was do or die. And that panic? Yeah, there was some of it. A lot of sleepless nights. A ton of stress and fear.

This isn’t a set of instructions. If you’re doing well, maybe you don’t want to burn any bridges to light a fire under your ass to make your online business work. I’m not telling anyone what to do in this particular post. I’m just trying to explain what I think is the difference between a really strong desire and a burning necessity. Do you WANT your business to succeed, or do you NEED it to succeed? Is it a desire or a requirement? Is it a way out of an unpleasant situation, or is it the air you need if you’re to keep breathing?

People have asked why my business worked, and I’ll tell you why: Because it had to. It HAD TO. There was simply no other option.

We don’t get our wants in life. We get our musts, our have-to’s.

I don’t think you should make your situation dire if it’s not already dire. But if you really want to succeed, you’re going to need to find a way to stop thinking of it as something you’d like and start thinking about it as something you need.

Then, when you feel as if your head’s underwater, don’t wait to drown. Kick and thrash like a motherfucker. Fight like your life depended on it. And you just might be surprised if your need is strong enough.

P.S: Okay, I hadn’t intended to make this one so heavy. Let me know if you have any questions I can answer next time — preferably ones amenable to dick jokes and farting noises?

So two things dawned on me after my last post ran here on IttyBiz. One, I think Abe Vigoda is dead but am not sure, and that quandary unsettles me. But perhaps more importantly, I should probably make it clear at all times that what you’re seeing when I write here and what you’re seeing a lot of the time when I write elsewhere is a case study. A lot of the time I’m not saying, “this is how it’s done.” I’m saying, “this is what I did.” Then I say, “This movie should really star Abe Vigoda. What? He’s dead? SHIT!”

It just goes to show that there is more than one way to skin a cat, which is a really disgusting expression when you think about it.

So for instance: A few people have contacted me privately to ask about niche websites, probably because they feel like an attractive entry point for a lot of people. Niche websites feel like the Ronco Rotisserie of internet commerce, where you just set it and forget it, then wait for the FedEx guy to show up with your massive AdSense checks and untold volumes of Moroccan hash. But personally, I didn’t find them easy at all. In fact, I abandoned them after setting up seven or eight niche sites, and in the past seven months or so, all of them together have earned $94. (They’re still up; I just ignore them.) Because AdSense won’t pay you until you hit $100, I’d still be waiting for my first internet dollar if I had used only that route.

But does this mean niche sites don’t work? No… or at least, I’m not willing to say that. I’m just saying they didn’t work for me.

And in my last post, when I said I started giving stuff away to build relationships and only then began selling? Not the only way to do it. Just the way I did it. And when I wrote about how SEO kind of sucks, I was speaking from my own experience, wherein relationships and word of mouth drew far better traffic than I would expect from the engines… again, for my type of business.

So when you read what I write, remember that you’re reading a case study. But it’s a good one, if I may be totally immodest. This business is only six months old, and it has now totally replaced my old income. Which, by the way, had to support a family of four with a mortgage and some hideous real estate investments.

That means that if I went to an office every day, I’d be quitting my job now. Do I count as one of the IttyBiz 1000?

(Naomi’s vacation note # 1: Yes.)

So anyway, on to today’s lesson, or at least to today’s installment of “this is what I did.”

How I began exposing myself

I don’t think it will surprise anyone that just about any business is about numbers. If you run a corner store, you want it on a street with a lot of foot traffic because more people walking by means more who stop at your store. If you run niche sites, you want as many people coming to those sites as possible because that means more will click on your ads. No matter what you do, a primary goal is to have as many eyes on you as possible. Conversion to customers obviously matters, but more visitors means more people available for conversion.

Knowing this, my biggest goal (secondary only to building good services and products to sell) was to get as much exposure as possible.

Because I wasn’t relying on search engine traffic to my sites and was in fact quite busy dodging shiruken angrily thrown at me by SEO expert Michael Martine, I needed to find other ways to get in front of people.

So I looked around to see who I knew.

Let’s step back a second, because by the time I was doing this, I already knew Naomi. A few people have even suggested that the fact that I knew her was the reason I was able to grow so quickly. But think about that for a second: Naomi isn’t my aunt. She’s not my neighbor. The only reason I knew her was because I kind of (KIND of) knew Havi Brooks. And although I’ve never confirmed it, I suspect I only knew Havi (or that she only knew me) because in late 2008, Chuck Westbrook did a little blog experiment and I was part of that. And how did I know Chuck? I didn’t. He put out a call for entries in his experiment, and I entered. I introduced myself on Twitter. It was up to him to decide whether he liked what I did or not.

In other words: Yes, I knew Naomi. And yes, knowing her helped my business. But I only knew her because of a series of connections, and she only began working with me because she liked what I did and apparently felt that I could help her as much as she could help me. This wasn’t an existing friend granting me a favor. There had to be an exchange of mutual benefit, and a bit of balls on my part to make the initial contact and suggest this little public experiment you’ve been watching.

(Naomi’s vacation note # 2: SpeakEasy members, you know how I’m always telling you to make contact with strangers? And you know how you always delete the email and roll your eyes? People’s exhibit A, y’all.)

The cool thing about getting to know someone with an audience is that once you do, you have a stage upon which to perform for other people. Sometimes, the people you’re now exposed to are people who can expose you even further. A lot of people like that (Darren Rowse of Problogger, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone of Copyblogger) know Naomi and watch what she does. So once I was on a stage in front of these folks, I got to perform for them, too.

Or perhaps more accurately, I got to audition for them, and do that “balls” thing again to see if I couldn’t get onto their stages as well.

This analogy is pretty accurate, too. Nobody owed me anything, and I wasn’t digging for sympathy exposure: “Hey, as a favor, check out this halfhearted post by some guy you’ve never heard of.”

Nope. Each new contact was an audition.

Every time I stepped in front of a new group of people, I thought of it like trying out for a role or a coveted position. I wanted to please readers, and I wanted to impress the people who had platforms of their own. When Naomi introduced me to Darren Rowse of Problogger, I busted my ass to write posts that Darren would love and that would benefit his readers, like the one on how to build trust online. I polished the shit out of my first post for Copyblogger, and kept sending more and more as long as Brian, Sonia, and Jon kept saying they liked them.

Wanting to maintain the exposure I already had, I also asked Naomi if what I was writing still appealed to her and to you fine folks.

She said, “About half of them like you. About half of them hate you. Maybe try to be less promotional about your own stuff.”

So I got my head out of my ass and tried to promote less when I wrote here. Tried to inform more, to answer both the questions you were asking and the questions you were implying. Remember, no step of this is about favors. Nobody owed me a position writing for y’all.

And all the while, I kept reaching out and making new contacts.

Naomi introduced me to Clay Collins. Clay liked what I did (I performed well at my internet-wide audition), and that’s why I ended up working on Project Mojave.

Through Clay, I met Michael Martine of Remarkablogger and Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind…. and through Michael, I met one of my most interesting and most promising new clients.

And then I realized that that client dated my wife briefly in college, proving that this big world really is a tiny, tiny place.

Everyone knows people. Everyone can branch out, connect, audition, and grow their network. This is a small world. You never know who knows whom.

But before I tie this up, I want to say one thing very clearly: I am not talking about using people, kissing ass, or climbing some sort of fucking internet ladder.

Got it? I will find and kick the ass of anyone who uses and steps on people. I will find and kick the ass of anyone who thinks the process is meet, climb up, dispose, repeat. Same for anyone who feels that only people who are well-known are worth meeting. You never know which casual exchange with someone you’ve never heard of on Twitter might lead to some great thing down the road. You never know which casual exchange will impact and benefit someone else, in a pay-it-forward sort of way.

As you do this, always remember that YOU are a giver as well as a receiver. If YOU only want to exploit and receive, then YOU a user and YOU kind of suck.

And whatever you do, don’t complain that you don’t know anyone. Everyone knows people, especially in the internet age. Haven’t you heard of that whole six degrees of separation thing? You might know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows knows the president. And the president called Kanye West “a jackass.” Think about it.

(Naomi’s vacation note # 3: I recently discovered that I am only three degrees away from Kevin Bacon. Through someone I met on the internet. HA!)

Build your network. More eyes on you means more potential to succeed. Your goal is to get those eyes, and also to watch out for Abe Vigoda’s zombie.

One comment in particular caught my eye:

“I want more specific step-by-step, how to make a shitload of money stuff. I have OBS, and tried to follow Johnny’s rise form obscurity to superstar, but it seemed too disjointed and i just couldn’t figure it out.”

Truth, Brent. I am disjointed. There’s actually a very good (if not very good) reason for that, and it’s this: I honestly have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.

(The better and perhaps more accurate way of saying that is that at least from my perspective, a lot of this internet business thing feels like it comes down to pursing the leads that present themselves and, ultimately, following your gut.)

Still, “do what feels right” is an incredibly shitty business imperative, and is probably totally wrong for most people, and would lead many into lives of ruin, living in cardboard boxes in alleyways, participating in bare-knuckle hobo fights just to earn enough money to buy some half-drank Mad Dog, scraping the adhesive off of packing tape and smoking it to get high, and begging — begging — for the sweet release of death.

So with that in mind, I’ll try to be a bit more specific.

I’d like to try in the coming weeks to give a bit more detail on what I did, and what I continue to do. You know, specifically. Or at least, as specific as I can make it.

So here we go.

Today’s lesson: The escalating prices principle.

I totally made that term up, and it means exactly nothing outside of this post. Don’t bother Googling it. Don’t ask other marketers about it. But if it takes off and becomes a buzzword, I totally want credit. You all are witnesses, much like Cleveland keeps trying to tell itself that Clevelanders are witnesses to LeBron James leading the city to glory. You know, because Cleveland isn’t still the ass of America or anything.

Johnny’s Escalating Prices Principle says this: Do not lay out your big, expensive products or services right away. You have to start giving stuff away. Then give more away. Then give more away. Then roll out cheap services. Then moderate services. Then — and only then — should you lay out the big ones. You have to be irritatingly, maddeningly patient.

Why? Well, think about this for a second: I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of clients in the past few months. None of them know me personally. Most have never talked to me on the phone. Almost none of them know my where I live, how I work, or what I’ve done outside of what’s on my website.

Yet all of them have, at one point, given me money in advance of my doing a service for them.

Don’t dismiss the Escalating Prices Principle. You’re going to need it if you want to engender the kind of trust necessary to do business online.

So here’s what my progression looked like:

1. Write your blog and begin by giving away words, posts, emotions, whatever.
At first, what I “gave away” through writing blog posts was just in the form of humor, “giving away” some levity during the course of a person’s day. I did have a book for sale, but it cost all of $15 and represented the entirety of my sales catalog. (This phase was accidental for me, by the way. If I had thought of anything I could sell, I would have tried. Good thing I didn’t.)

I’ll bet all of you have step one handled. Most bloggers successfully blog, but don’t successfully make any money at it. Well, don’t sweat it. This is a necessary step. When you have nothing for sale as a newcomer, you aren’t threatening. Nobody worries that you may be trying to rip them off if all you do is write and try to be engaging.

Do this right and find some friends on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever else, and people will start to know who you are.

2. Diversify the places through which you can give away words, posts, emotions, whatever.
I’m talking about guest posts, or guest writing gigs in general. (Naomi’s note: Sneaking in as a guest for other people’s teleseminars, podcasts, and so on is also a nice way to do this if you are reading this and thinking, “if I have to write one more word in the rest of my goddamn life I am going to find the nearest oven, gas or otherwise, and stick my head in it”. Not that I know anything about that. Because I don’t.)

As the free stages progress, you should start to feel like you’re doing a ton of stuff for no result. If you’re not occasionally annoyed that you’re doing all of this work and getting nothing in return, and if you’re not occasionally fighting with yourself because you think you should be finding paid work to do instead, then you’re not doing enough. Work and work for free until you can’t take it anymore.

Guest posts are not always easy to get, but if you make your presence known through #1 and if you’re any good at your topic, you’ll eventually find people interested in publishing something you wrote on their better-known blog. Keep at it.

For me, this meant The Discomfort Zone, Finance Your Freedom, Mattress Police (run by a guy who works for Google but hasn’t SEO-optimized his permalinks; what does that tell you?), and of course IttyBiz. IttyBiz has been great in that it’s every week (barring long Canadian summer vacations), but which is tough because it’s EVERY FUCKING WEEK.

Then I leveraged those, eventually posting on Copyblogger and Problogger. (Naomi vouched for me on the latter.) Remember, this is still all about gaining exposure and demonstrating your worthiness. You need that foundation before you sell anything.

3. Give bigger stuff away for free.
If I had to single out the point where this all really started to come together for me, it was when, through Naomi’s urging, I wrote my WordPress blog setup guide and offered it for free. Now, it wasn’t totally free; you had to give me your email address, which I added to my list. At this point, I’m starting to gain trust and credibility. I’m still working for free, but more people know me and believe I know what I’m talking about. People use the guide and love it. They tell their friends. And because these people have joined my list, I can keep in touch with them through later phases.

This was also about the time I truly found that niche and moved from being a straight humor blogger into a humorous tech blogger. This was a bit of trial and error, and what I found was that there’s very little money to be made in humor for the average guy.

4. Give even bigger stuff away for free.
I’ll bet this is getting irritating to read. We’re at step #4 and everything is still free. Well, hang tight, Chuckie, because things are starting to accelerate.

At this point, I’m talking about giving away a service or product — something of decent value — in order to get some testimonials and buzz.

At the end of April, I offered to do free blog setups for about a week. Around 30-40 people took me up on that (which, by the way, only happened in such volume because of the exposure I’d gained through steps 1-3), and I got a shitload of testimonials. I also got a shitload of good will, and a bunch of the people who I met via a free service came back to me later when they needed more paid work.

You do step 4 right, and you’ve gained a bunch of social proof. That’s pretty essential from here on out. Your customers will want to know that others have worked with you and had good things to say about the experience.

5. Start charging for something cheap.
In saying this, I don’t mean to take an expensive service and offer it for cheap. I don’t think I’d take consulting that should cost $150 per hour and charge only $30 for it, but maybe you could make that work as long as everyone knew the price was a special deal and that very quickly, it would bounce up to its proper cost.

What I mean is to find a small service and debut that one first. For me, it was those cheap WordPress blog setups, which I now do for $39. $39 is nothing to spend. It’s an easy leap for people who have begun to have a little bit of trust in a person they’ve never actually met.

6. Scale your prices upward from there.
You can check out the full suite of services on my website to see where I went from there. These rolled out slowly — one or maybe two per month, with the price point moving up into the $100 range. From there, I debuted consulting. Consulting is a hard sell because people have to REALLY trust you to sign up for it, and it’s not cheap. People have to believe not only that you do good work, but that your ideas are worth paying for. At $150/hr, my consulting was a fairly late edition. Fortunately, my consulting clients seem to feel it’s worth it. (Rock the fuck on!) (Naomi’s note to Johnny’s clients: Call me. We need to talk. Seriously, it’s not worth it. He’s a jackass and he says “fuck” ALL THE TIME. Oh, wait. Never mind. As you were.)

The coup de grace so far has been my course, Zero to Business: A ridiculously simple guide to turning your online business from tech headache to profit center. Z2B is a cost-effective alternative to hiring me (or anyone) to build your blog, set up your mailing list and e-commerce, build your affiliate programs, etc. But without knowing me and having come to trust me, even “cost-effective” would look unattractive because for all a person knows, the content could be total shit.

Yes, Z2B does sell — but it never would have without my having paid a shitload of attention to numbers 1-5 above.

(And by the way, YES, this is the same course that used to be called Make the Internet Your Bitch. I can tell that story in an upcoming lesson, “Why it’s a bad idea to put ‘bitch’ in the name of your product even if you think it’s hilarious, because you don’t get many referrals when ordinary folks have to say ‘bitch’ to their friends and co-workers.”)

Suggestions for upcoming lessons are totally encouraged. I can keep tossing this stuff at you based on my own perception of what you’d like to hear, but I’ve already admitted I don’t always know what the hell I’m doing. I’m trying to make “charmingly clueless” part of my personal brand. How’s it working?

I wrote this post. Me, Johnny. And I wrote it because I embarked on this effort throughout June and into July to get my readers off their asses, and I realized even as many got off of their asses that there’s one troubling issue that, if left unaddressed, will doom any GOYA effort. And it’s this:

Most people think that earning money is bad.

I’ll give you a second to clean up that coffee you just spilled down the front of your shirt., and when you’re all tidy and ready to listen to more of my stupid, nonsensical, unfounded bullshit, we’ll continue.

You may think it sounds ridiculous to claim that people think earning money is bad, but it’s true. If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself a few questions… and if you pass this little quiz with flying colors, try to put yourself in the shoes of Joe Average and ask them again:

1. Have you ever secretly resented a friend’s raise or good fortune?

2. Have you ever seen a rich person and thought, “He probably inherited it rather than earning it.”

3. Have you ever extolled the virtue and simple dignity of modest living, or thought of manual labor as a special kind of “good, honest work”?

4. Have you ever made a lot of money and stopped yourself from telling anyone, or else played it down?

5. Have you ever been buying something for a price that seemed reasonable — and then, discovering that the profit margin was huge or that the seller “wasn’t actually doing much,” gotten mad and suddenly resented that same price?

Now think about your answers, and think about the little justification game that’s probably going on inside your head right now. At the root of every “yes” response is the belief that earning a lot of money is somehow gratuitous, or ignoble, or the work of corruption.

Listen to that battle carefully, because whichever voice is winning will determine how successful your business can ever be.

Look, I’m not telling anyone how to think. If you feel that having a lot of money is gratuitous or ignoble, that’s your business. But don’t try to Get Off Your Ass, start a new venture. and then wonder why you’re not making any money if you do.

If you think that modest living is noble, you’ll never charge enough to prosper because that would mean that you’re unprincipled.

If you resent people who charge a lot of money for a small amount of work, you’ll always find a way to work long hours for low wages.

If you think that sales is about getting people to let go of hard-earned money rather than about exchanging value, you’ll never be able to sell a fucking thing.

This topic may seem to be a real tangent coming from me, but it’s been on my mind recently because in June, I debuted my coaching/consulting service. Then on July 15th, I launched my “Make the Internet Your Bitch” course (which will get a new title soon, by the way; I misjudged my branding). It took me a while to decide on prices for those things because it meant putting a dollar value on my knowledge and ability in a very fixed and tangible way for the first time.

Honestly, I thought. What is my knowledge worth? Because knowledge is not a bundle of shingles or three pounds of diamonds. It’s intangible, with a value that is up to speculation.

If I priced too low, I would devalue that knowledge. I would be saying that what was in my head wasn’t more valuable than a bowling ball or a loaf of bread, or maybe a small TV.

But? But… if I priced too high, part of me still protested that I’d be perceived as “asking too much for not ‘doing’ much.”

If you aren’t screaming right now that I should be paid for my knowledge and that I am not doing nothing just because I’m not hauling heavy rocks, then you’re guaranteeing yourself a future of hauling heavy rocks. The minute you try to make a profit without breaking your back to do it, your mind will remind you how loathsome that is. Your mind will doom you to failure because it’ll remind you that knowledge should be free and that hauling fewer rocks makes you a louse who expects money for nothing.

I’ve got a story to go with this. It’s an adaptation of a famous parable:

A man discovers that his very valuable and specialized computer is broken. He tries everything he can think of to fix it, but is unable to. He calls everyone he knows, and nobody can help. He takes it to various repairmen, but none of them can solve his problem. Then he hears about a technician who specializes in this type of repair, so he calls him. The technician comes in, turns one screw a quarter turn, and then says, “That’ll be five hundred dollars.” The customer hits the roof and says, “Five hundred dollars? That’s ridiculous! All you did was turn one tiny screw!”

And the technician says, “The charge isn’t for turning the screw. It’s for knowing which screw to turn, in which direction, and how far.”

If you think that the technician’s charge is ludicrous, think carefully about why you feel that way. Then ask yourself if, feeling that way, you could ever double your rate even if people were willing to pay it. Ask yourself how much luck you’ll have trying to find ways to do less and earn more. Think about the connection you’ve made between hard labor and money, and how tightly the two are tied in your mind. Ask yourself if you’ll ever truly prosper with that work-money link in place.

Now put yourself in the customer’s shoes in that little parable. You’re allowed to be shocked at the technician’s price, but ask yourself if in the end, you’d gladly pay it. Ask yourself if you’d shell out for results and valuable information regardless of how much “work” was required by the seller. Ask yourself if you’re truly going to refuse to let go of the notion that large amounts of money are only earned through hard and long work.

Think about it: Was the customer paying for a certain kind of performance from the technician? Or was he, in reality, paying for the end result of restoring his computer to working order?

Would the fee somehow have been more reasonable if the technician had spent ten or twenty hours working on the problem… but the result was the same in the end?

And given that nobody else could fix the computer, would the customer have preferred that it remain broken? If not, was the service in fact worth the charge?

If you still feel that what the technician did amounts to exploitation, ask yourself if he’s selling water in the desert or oxygen in outer space. Exploition occurs when the customer has no choice but to buy.

For 99.99% of sellers, you cannot exploit your customers because if your service is not worth what you’re asking, the market will naturally move away from you. In other words, your customers have the option not to buy.

You cannot believe that high prices are exploitation. You must believe that they are justified charges paid in exchange for products or services of equal or greater value. You need to believe that your customers are damn lucky to have you and your expertise. You need to believe that you deserve to be paid well. If someone knocks your value, it should make your blood boil.

Traditional belief says that vendors should be thankful for customers. But if you don’t believe the inverse is true as well, you’ll never truly prosper. Sales isn’t just about receiving money. It’s also about the customer receiving value, and you’d better fucking know that deep in your gut. The income you receive isn’t charity. You fucking earned it.

One final story, and then I’ll let you get back to that coffee you keep spilling on yourself.

I belong to a forum, and it’s full of really cool guys. When I self-published my book, I let them know, and many of them bought it. I thanked them. They thanked me for the books. We had a tight community, and these guys were like my brothers. But while this was going on, this one guy writes the following:

“Where are the profits going? I’ll buy if they’re going to a worthy cause, like maybe to help run this site, but why should I otherwise? I asked once earlier about this and he made some flip response about buying hookers.”

And I replied:

“You know, I’m getting really tired of this Robin Hood shit. I wrote the book. Me. Therefore, the profits are going to ME, the person whose intellectual fucking property it is. Maybe if you want to work for nothing, you could spend months creating something and then give it away, or maybe just go to work and do your job for free because God forbid your boss should have to pay you for it.

I gave you a flip response earlier because I thought you must be joking, implying that I should do anything with the money other than what I deserve to do with it: WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT.”

He was implying that what I was offering was of so little value that I should be paid nothing for it. He was implying that I should do all the work, but that the profits should go to people who did nothing.

Put yourself in my shoes. If that wouldn’t make you rage, your dreams of prosperity die here and now.

You earn more when you believe that what you’re giving in exchange is incredibly valuable. Feel it. Know it.

Consider a consultant who charges $500 per hour. Who the hell decided she was worth that much?

She did.

It was ultimately up to the market to either agree with her or not — but she had to believe it first.

There is nothing wrong with making money. There is nothing wrong with charging whatever the market will pay for services of value, regardless of how much “work” appears to be involved.

Believe that. Believe it with all your heart and soul.

If you can’t, if you don’t, or if you won’t, then you frankly should stop reading about marketing and get the fuck out of business.

JOHNNY’S NOTE: I actually wrote this post back in June, before Naomi went and got all Canadian for the summer. So, updating it now, I realize I have a TON of new interesting experiences as a neophyte online businessman to relate, all of which will hopefully make you all tingle with excitement (not excrement) because you’ll be flush with new ideas for your own business.

Meh. You might as well read this anyway, because otherwise you have to get back to work. Or maybe surf for porn. (If it’s the latter, go ahead. I’d make the same choice.)

So here’s what happened.

It started way, way back in the early days, in the year of Our Lord 2008. A young and in-love Rihanna made us dance with “Disturbia.” We learned that a panda can practice Kung Fu, and the big-eared guy running the USA was still Republican. It was a simpler, more idyllic time — a time when a guy from Ohio thought the best way to start his humor career would be to self-publish a tangible, on-paper book, called May Contain Nuts.

I had shopped my book around to traditional publishing agents for a while, and had unsuccessfully done the same for a novel I’d written years earlier. Unfortunately, these agents didn’t recognize true awesomeness when they saw it, so I decided to self-publish my collected works as a print-on-demand book.

After a fair amount of research, I decided to go through Lulu. Lulu had a much better profit structure than competiors like iUniverse, which charged large setup fees and kind of stuck a broomstick up your ass with regard to royalties. Lulu was solid because they didn’t require holding my hand and charging me for the privilege. I already know a lot about layout (I grew up in my mother’s graphic design firm), so I could do the grunt work myself, give Lulu a Microsoft Word file and a PDF of the cover, and they’d just print what I’d given them.

Now, if you’re thinking about publishing a book, you’ll want to run the numbers yourself, but I found that I could greatly increase my profit if I had the books shipped to me and then reshipped them to buyers. That’s not the way most people do it. Lulu will handle the fulfillment for you if you want — you can just put a link on your site and when someone orders, you’ll get a set royalty. Using that setup, I would have made around $4.50 per $9.95 book sold, and the customer would have paid $15.50 once shipping was factored in.

But I realized that if I had 30 of them shipped to me at once and then sold one at a time for the same total cost of $15.50, the shipping got a lot cheaper and I could make $7.50 per book. And as a bonus, this approach allowed me to sign the books, which caused many satisfied customers to proclaim, “Hey asshole, why did you write in my book?”

I have sold quite a few copies (though not nearly as many as I’d hoped), and it’s neat to be able to say that you have a book because it’s not obvious to most people that any idiot with a computer could publish anything they wanted. (Naomi’s note: For the love of God, click that link. Do it quickly and then X out of the browser while you still have some of your innocence. You KNOW you want to.) But if you’re in the brainstorming phase of your business and don’t yet know what you want to do, I’ll just mention that I didn’t dig the physical products biz as much as I dig the other OBS modules.

Here’s why I’m not as keen on selling a tangible thing:

1. You have to pay to get it, make it, and/or process it in the first place, so the profit is often less. In my case, I had to “pay” over half of the total plus-shipping cost of my book (the $15.50 paid by my customers) to Lulu, the post office, OfficeMax for mailing supplies, and so on. If you’re selling hairnets at a markup, you have to buy the hairnets. If you’re knitting hats, you have to buy the yarn. The costs associated with services, downloads, consulting, and so on are usually much, much less. (Sell a $15.50 e-book and guess how much of that you keep? No big bonus if you answer correctly.)

2. There’s usually more work involved. You have to write and format an e-book the same as you have to write a physical book. Similarly, you have to create systems to sell your own knitted hats the same as you’d need to create systems to sell someone else’s knitted hats as an affiliate. But you have to pack up your books and your hats. You have to fill out the mailing labels. You have to take them to the post office. You have to buy the yarn, order the books for printing, and of course do the knitting. Now, think about an e-book: You put it online, set up the purchase options, and then can pretty much forget about it.

3. This is totally my opinion and may be really wrong in many cases, but I felt like it was harder to sell physical products online. I think that in many ways, deep down, we as people like to touch the “touchable” things we buy. The internet has changed that, and people are getting pretty comfortable with buying without touching. But I think that buyers still wonder on some level, “What will that knitted hat look like on me?” “What will that book feel like in my hands when I’m at the beach, and does its paper and printing make it comfortable to read?” (Ever notice that the paper in most books is off-white instead of bright white? There’s a reason for that.) Amazon can sell based on “touchability trust” (I’m going to trademark that term), but can you?

4. The cycle time is usually longer. Physical shipping adds days to each end of the process, and it means a delay between the time a customer orders and the time she receives the product. Hats take time to knit and even print-on-demand books take time to print. e-Goods can be online fast and are delivered fast — and you can have satisified customers fast, perhaps telling you that what you do kicks Richard Nixon’s ass.

Of course, buyers have questions about intangiables as well: “Is this person a good coach?” “Will this e-book be any good?” But the internet doesn’t add as many barriers to these things. Yes, you can look a coach in the eye if you’re face-to-face, but you’ll wonder if she’s a good coach no matter how you found her.

Now: There are of course advantages to physical products. Tangible goods can be more unique (there are more “hand-crafted” opportunities in the physical world), and people often find more value in something they can touch and hold. Technophobes are more comfortable with physical products (but probably not with buying them online), and certain tangibles have huge profit potential.

But for me? Not so much. I know that physical products are the cornerstone of the world’s economy, and that many of you make or will make a great living by selling “real things.” I know there are dozens of advantages I haven’t mentioned. I know that to many people, a physical book (for instance) is way more satisfying than an e-book. Hell, I agree. I hate reading e-books.

But as a seller? Personally, I’m not a fan.

Trading physical goods is how things have been done for centuries. However, I kind of thing that it’s mainly because nobody could work out the logistics of how to download a goat during a barter.

(Naomi’s other note: He’s just bitter because his book sucked. OK, if I’m honest, it didn’t suck. But he started the book thing before he met my shining self and learned how to actually sell shit. If he were to do it again with yours truly, I think he’d like the whole thing a lot more. Just sayin’.)

—–

But wait, there’s more! I have two P.S’s. They’re both as fantastic as they are stylish and handsome.

P.S #1: If you get my upcoming product once it’s available, you’ll have so much sex that you won’t know what to do with it. It’ll become annoying and you’ll be like, “What the hell am I supposed to do with all of this sex?” So you’ll pack it in boxes and label it and put it up in the garage attic and then years from now your spouse or kids will be like, “Do we really need to keep all of this old sex?” And you’ll be like, “No, it’s all old and moldy. Throw it out or give it to the dog.”

P.S #2: I’m knocking $35 off of Blogger-to-WordPress migrations until the end of the month. If you’re on Blogger and have finally realized how unprofessional it makes you look (it’s on par with using a Yahoo! email address for your business and wearing Hammer pants in meetings), now’s the time to move. Tell your Blogger friends, too. We’ll move over together, glory in our escape from a stupid medium, and then collectively laugh at Blogger and make fun of how small its dick is.