When Something Goes Wrong With Your Small Business
Story time. If you don’t know the whole sordid story behind the ebook, you can read it here. (For SEO School students, that was a really bad example of optimization. Because I heart irony.) Settle in, though, because it got 95 comments and none of them were me going in to pad the numbers.
Today, I got some traffic from Problogger. (I totally just wrote that as “Problotter”, by the way.) It’s always nice to get traffic from there because it is a Really Big and Important Blog. Today, though, it was especially nice. Skellie’s in charge at the moment because Darren is off cavorting with other bloggy types at Blog World Expo right now. She wrote a post about blog business models. 10 of ‘em. IttyBiz and Ninja SEO School were number two. I think we can all agree on the total fucking awesomeness of this.
You should go and read it, but if you’re busy, here’s a snippet:
“If you click the link you’ll notice that it’s no longer for sale, and I hope the ProBlogger mention hasn’t made Naomi regret the decision ;).
By making the choice to say the eBook would only be available for a limited time, readers who would have post-poned the decision of whether to buy the product until later (and then probably forgot about it) were forced to act quickly.
…
Though there are many blogs funneling into an eBook, I chose IttyBiz as an example because of the clever use of artificial scarcity as a marketing tool. (Though if you emailed Naomi, I bet she’d still sell you a copy!)”
Don’t email me. Why?
Because three weeks ago, we decided to put an updated Ninja SEO School back on the market. We’ve been working with Charlie to get it organized, and one of the things we were trying to figure out was how to launch it.
On one hand, we could capitalize on the buzz. Make a big fuss. Lots of red text screaming, “JUST 14 DAYS TILL YOU CAN BUY!!!” We could probably sell a shitload of books that way.
On the other hand, we could go totally low key. Quietly put it back on the shelves, give it a sentence in another blog post, go back to life as normal and hope for limited bad press.
We decided we’d go with something close to the latter. We were going to announce it on Friday, give the weekend traffic time to see the post and get excited, and then relaunch Monday morning.
Now I risk looking like a total asshole.
There are two reasons why I’m telling you all of this.
1. Damage control on the Filthy Marketing Whore front.
If I wait till Friday, it’s going to look like I got an insane amount of traffic and tried to capitalize on it. I didn’t, and I’m not. If I say something now, not so much. Still a bit of filthy marketing whore, but not as much as if I’d waited.
2. You need to know that there are things that can’t be controlled.
Shit goes wrong. You gotta roll with it. Martha Stewart gave entrepreneurship classes in prison, for God’s sake. Probably, in the long term, this will go well. (The whole “no press is bad press” thing.) But in the short term, I’m going to feel dirty. I’m going to be all, “What if people don’t understand? What if they don’t realize? I have to tell them it wasn’t intentional!!!”
Sometimes you try to propose to the girl at the baseball game and it gets rained out and she can’t make the rain date. You gotta get down on one knee in the stadium parking lot and get on with it, dudes. Life’s too short to freak out.
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