Sep
15
Johnny Gives You The Gory Details
A while ago, Naomi asked y’all what you wanted out of IttyBiz. That post got a lot of responses. A few people were interested in mentoring case studies, and some wanted practical how-to guides. Predictably, Tim Brownson wanted more fish. They eat them with chips where he’s from, that bastard.
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?
Yep, workin’ for ya so far. :D
I’ve done steps 1 & 3, and they’re working great. I’m about to do step 4, and trying to work out a better step 5 than just “go buy my book”. I’ve got ideas for step 6, but need to get feedback from steps 4 & 5 to see which way to go.
It’s good to see it all laid out this way, sort of validating that what I’m doing can work.
By the way, I seem to have this mental block about step 2. Part of it is wanting to keep all my stuff on *my* site. Stupid, I know, but hard to get past. Part of it is wanting to make it “on my own”. Also stupid, but I don’t like asking for help.
By the way, your “humorous tech blogger” link goes to a blank page.
Thanks, Drew. That’s because I wrote this a few weeks ago and my old sites were still around. Now they’re at http://jonnybtruant.com. The only link that didn’t survive was that one!
I think I still owe you an email, too. I haven’t forgotten. I’m just horribly disorganized.
FUCK. That’s http://joHnnybtruant.com
Can I just say:
a) thanks for this, the step by steps are wonderful, and probably explain where I’ve skipped a few things and gone wrong
b) Can I humbly suggest “A to Business?” In an alphabet sort of way? I know you just renamed it and all, but… ;)
Look again. It points to the right domain, but it’s at “/blog”. You put the blog on the homepage.
Jeff – You’re welcome, and no fucking way. You wouldn’t believe how complicated it was to change the name of that damn product.
Drew – I know, it’s broken. It’s cool. I’m going to leave it broken because I put a wildcard redirect up there for the entire site and don’t want to dick with page-specific redirects on LTBYOVA. This is the only place where that URL exists anymore.
Good stuff, Johnny (haven’t considered changing your name to Maynard, have you? Oh, I just dated myself horribly).
And the progression totally makes sense. I think most of us (me included) want to skip straight from step 1 to step 5 or 6 (a little bit of free and then suddenly we “have to” charge for our stuff or we’re “devaluing our work and ourselves”).
Or we’re (uh, I’m) kindasorta working on all of steps 1 through 5 at the same time, instead of consciously holding back on the paid stuff until the right time in the sequence.
And then there are the times like now: I’ve got a plan in place to introduce some stuff slowly, ramp up on the blogging to support it, and barely scrape by, finance-wise, for a month or two while I’m patiently building that good old social proof, and then it suddenly turns out MY CAT IS DIABETIC and I need to spend hundreds of dollars I don’t have on CAT INSULIN. People, you can NOT make this shit up.
Also? Dude, you should totally trademark Escalating Prices Principle. That’s got Google juice all over it (yum!).
Ouch, sorry, but I totally disagree.
No matter what you do, if you’re offering a high end product or service, it’s going to take you a while to get customers. Sure, blogging is good pr and you are technically “giving away your words”, as you are with any advertising you do.
Regardless, you need to put yourself out there. Businesses fail because sales aren’t made. Putting one’s self through a lengthy indirect process, hoping to gain fans that might/maybe become customers looks like the path to brokeness to me.
There are some cases something like that could work. Low cost products (maybe). Niche sex toys? Novels. Blogs with an advertising business model. For those of us who actually want customers to plonk down a good sized chunk of money, though, the people out there who are actually looking for the product or service you provide, are actually out there looking for the product or the service you provide. I say hit them up with what they’re looking for. Don’t dance. Sell.
Sorry, Mike… I didn’t clarify very well, but what I absolutely mean in all of this is:
THIS IS WHAT I DID.
It does look like I’m implying “this is the way to do it.” Not the case. In fact, I’m working with a guy now who thinks I do too much indirect “profile raising” and says I should sell more and sell harder. But that’s just not how I work.
Yes, by all means, there are other ways to do this. Maybe better ways. But this is how I did it.
re: THIS IS WHAT I DID.
Surely, what worked for you, worked for you, and I appreciate all the sharing you & N do on this blog. There is no one success formula, and no piece of business advice that will work for everybody.
I’ve been “self employed” (as opposed to being a “business owner”, ala e-myth) since… 1970? Something like that. I’m both highly opinionated and open minded. Odd combination, huh? Anyway, blog posts such as these kind of point that out.
Just curious, do you read Stratfor? It’s the only successful news source out there in regards to business models of which I’m aware. (I’m not associated with them at all, just dig the way they do business.)
Mike
I don’t know what or who Stratfor is, if that tells you anything out there.
Seriously, I’m not kidding when I say I’m winging a lot of this. I absorb what I hear and learn and what I’m coached about, but what ends up happening just happens. I don’t think in terms of models, product funnels, business plans, or anything.
Is that wise? Probably not. Ha, that’s messed up.
re: I don’t know what or who Stratfor is
They are basically a new source, sort of a blog and sort of a newspaper. They charge $350/year for their weekly newsletter. They’re able to do that because they actually do research, think things through and provide in depth information, as opposed to all the superficial biased bullshit you see on the NY Times site, et al. (My opinion.) The topic is international politics. If that ain’t your cup of tea, their newsletters will immediately put you to sleep.
re: I don’t think in terms of models, product funnels, business plans, or anything.
There are a lot of really bright people out there who’ve been there/done that. I used to moderate for the Usenet newsgroups misc.business.consulting, misc.business.moderated , misc.business.marketing and misc.entrepreneurs (I think those were the names of those groups). If you’re ever just browsing around and want to read some really interesting business conversations, I would recommend you go back five/ten years into those groups and see what people had to say. (That’s around the time I was with those groups. I don’t know whether they still exist and whether or not they’re active.)
Mike
ok weird and wild. I am sure there a lot of people out there setting up blogs for people – I am just starting out and hope to help people.
Inspiring blog post thats for sure. Hope I can become one of the ittybiz 1000.
Yes, dear, charmingly clueless is coming across and working for you ~ ! Great post, actually, and it’s REALLY impressive (and fun) to watch the baby learn to walk and then he’s suddenly running — ! You’re a swell model, starting back with your ‘not taking it anymore’ rant and this post is a smart recap of your journey — your mother and I are very proud of you.
(And Naomi’s interjections are that wonderfully lemony icing on the homemade-by-a-boy cake you’ve got going here — a fun read, thanks.)
Oh, I really like this post. This is close to how I (would) do things. It makes me so edgy when I read about people doing this the other way around and faster, even if they are successful it just makes me feel too heavy to think I have to do it that way. I wonder if there is some connection to personality type and they process they choose for a business model…reading about people who made a great business out of selling fast and selling fast just makes me think I’ll never be able to accomplish my goals. Thank you for writing about how you are doing things.
now a request: how about some pre-1-6 steps posts. like how to actually get off your ass and start; with real anti-numbing fear tips and not just a big stroke to get you started but not all the way to the big O?
Great post, I always love to peek behind the scenes to see *exactly* what people did.
Note to people reading this: you don’t have to wait as long to charge for higher priced stuff as Johnny did! I see a lot of people that are afraid of charging and afraid of selling and they could use this type of model as an excuse as to why they still aren’t making any money. I totally agree that you have to give away a lot of value for free to be trusted BUT I also think you should establish yourself as Someone Who Charges for Stuff from day one so people don’t get in a relationship with you where they’re outraged when you ask them to pay for anything.
For the record, my first offering ever in my current business model was a $97 product and a few months later my second offering was a $600-$1000 product. It can be done!
Thanks for the numbered list, that always makes it so much easy on technically challenged like me. I didn’t start out that way, I put up a site, filled it with good content (atleast i think its good… sniff) and created an ebook to sell.
So if i jumped the gun do i still go back and do the same steps or is that ruined now?
Thanks!
Laura makes a smart point that I know is right because I did not do it.
Jumping right in and selling is fine for people who are willing to do that, and/or can learn to do it reasonably well. Doesn’t work for me. Doesn’t work as in, I tried it (quite assiduously, in fact) and I am a worse salesman than Willy Loman.
For most of the people I work with (and know), telling them to “just get in there and sell something” is like saying “just get your ass to the summit of Everest and quit being a damned crybaby.” They’re going to need some prep.
@Maren Kate – Without really knowing you and your situation, it’s hard to say. As I mentioned earlier, this is what *I* did, and it works well for me. I don’t think I’m a bad salesman per se like Sonia describes, but I don’t hard-sell well. I’m like a backdoor salesman. I hang around, you get to know me, and then you eventually need what I have or know someone who does. So it works for me. And I think it could work for a lot of people.
But the points by Laura and others are equally true for others. It depends on you. There are entire schools of thought on selling from zero.
Now, that site you have is absolutely awesome. And I’ll also bet you get a lot of one-off traffic that comes to you from a search for eBay information, and is either sold in that one hit or not. If that’s the case, then my model wouldn’t work well. You’ll need to sell them right away, and honestly, I think what you have there is THE SHIT as far as that’s concerned (i.e. it’s really good).
I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me that your business is as “relationship focused” as mine is. If that’s the case, then yes, you’ll need to sell earlier.
(I should clarify that all of the above are just my opinions, of course.)
@Maren Kate — I second Johnny’s foul-mouthed declaration — your site really IS the shit. I buy maybe two things a year from eBay (and renegotiate the shipping fees), have never sold (no interest), and yet your site makes me WANT to get into it. (And to reduce my screen width to omit the background, but that’s me.)
It’s really swell, I wish you well with it, and a huge pat on the back for a lot of things well done on and with it — very cool. (Also agree that your biz is not as relationship-dependent as some others — more education-driven… you might like Teaching Sells, which I think Johnny and Naomi must be affiliates for — rock on, girl.
~GirlPie
A classmate urged me to look at this post, nice post, fanstatic read… keep up the cool work!
Nice post, intresting read. Keep posting and I’ll come back for some more reading! Thanks!