Boring but valuable
World of Warcraft mirrors real life in astonishing ways, none more so than in economics. One of the easiest ways to make gold in World of Warcraft is through in-game professions, and these professions have a powerful lesson to teach us: boring but valuable pays well because no one wants to do it, but everyone wants it done.
People are by nature looking for the fastest, easiest way to get things done and play the game, as opposed to grinding out stuff like professions. Playing the professions mini-game inside the game is boring, but valuable. As a result, they will pay absurd premium prices for things they could easily do themselves in the name of expediency, in order to get to the “fun part”. Here’s a very quick example.
Moonglow ink is made from a variety of herbs, all of which are easy to get, even for beginners. Collect 20 peace bloom and you’ll make about 5 bottles of moonglow ink, which is useful for making low level glyphs. In a purely rational market, the price of moonglow ink should be 4x the price of any of its component herbs. 12 silver is what an herb should cost, so 20 of them is 2 gold, 40 silver. That pile of herbs makes about 5 inks. A stack of 20 moonglow inks should therefore cost 9 gold, 60 silver. Yet when we check on the pricing data, we see something quite contrary to expectations:
54 gold. That’s a 562% markup. 562%, from doing something that any beginner in the game can do, but people don’t want to because it’s not exciting, even if it’s necessary for them to get the most out of the game.
What does this have to do with the real world? Recite the lesson: boring but valuable pays well because no one wants to do it, but everyone wants it done.
Affiliate marketers understand this already very well – transform web traffic (boring but valuable to generate) into an asset that can then be resold to other companies at a tremendous markup. Resellers understand this already very well, too: take a commodity that someone else produces (boring), add a transformation or benefit (valuable), and resell at a much higher price. There’s a huge market of virtual assistants because so much of what we do every day is boring but valuable, and they’re more than willing to trade their time for our money – and we trade it happily and eagerly.
Look for boring but valuable all throughout your company’s products and services! It’s beyond obvious to turn 20 Peacebloom into ink for 9 gold instead of paying 54 gold for them on the market, yet it’s a highly profitable venture because it’s boring and no one wants to do it, but everyone wants it done. Have you got an audience of your own in social media? You’ve accomplished the boring but valuable part. Now find someone who wants that part done but doesn’t want to do it, and you’ve got a business opportunity. Have you got a killer email marketing list? Boring but valuable – someone will pay for access to your list in lieu of building their own.
What have you got that no one wants to do, but everyone wants done? Someone out there is willing to pay top dollar to you right now for it. Go find them.
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3 Key Questions To Ask About Your Metrics
Now that I’m on my “world tour” of summer speaking, I’m having the rather pleasant opportunity of listening to people talk about their marketing challenges. One consistent theme that keeps cropping up is about metrics, and more importantly, the use of them in your marketing. It would seem a lot of folks are bewildered by the sheer volume of data available to them, and aren’t sure what to pay attention to.
There are 3 key questions you need to ask about your metrics, key performance indicators, stats, etc. that will greatly clarify things for you and help you choose what to measure.
1. How valuable is the metric?
One of the best places to start in any discussion of metrics is to figure out where the metric comes from and how valuable it is. As a general rule of thumb, the more valuable a metric is, the harder it is to obtain.
For example, knowing how many Twitter followers you have is a very easy number to come by. Knowing how many Twitter followers are active prospects for your business is significantly harder (and more valuable), since it involves tying together Twitter and your CRM.
Knowing how many Twitter followers are influential broadly is easy. You can use any number of sites like Klout, Tweetreach, etc. to get rough, big numbers. How many Twitter followers are influential specifically to the subset of Twitter users that are your key demographic is significantly harder and requires a lot of data mapping.
As Tom Webster of Edison Research says, do the work. Figure out what metrics will provide real value for you.
2. What does the metric mean?
Metrics by themselves are meaningless, even if they’re reliable and valuable, if you don’t understand their value to your business. For example, one of the more valuable statistics in web analytics is absolute unique visitors to your website. This number tells you an approximation of how many human beings actually laid eyes on your site.
What does this mean? By itself, not much. You can tell day to day or week to week that it’s going up or down, but if you have no other context or framework for it, it’s largely unhelpful. Once you put it in the context of a marketing funnel, however, it becomes a lot more meaningful. A general rule of thumb is that every meaningful metric has a subsequent meaningful metric that provides even more value. Audience numbers lead to prospects, which lead to leads, which lead to sales, which lead to repeat customers, which lead to evangelists, which lead back to more audience.
For example, absolute unique visitors is a metric near the top of your funnel, the prospective customers who walk into your online shop to browse. They wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t some tiny sliver of interest in who you are and what you have to offer. If no one is walking into your shop, the best conversion metrics are useless. Conversely, if you have crowds of people walking into your shop daily, you can start to talk meaningfully about lead generation or customer conversion.
3. What should you do about it?
This last question is the least asked about metrics, yet is the most valuable of all. If you’re aboard a cruise ship that is taking on water, there are lots of meaningful, valuable metrics. How many people are there aboard, and are there enough lifeboats? How fast is the ship sinking? How much time do you have left?
All of those metrics are totally irrelevant (despite their perceived value) if you’re not actually getting off the sinking ship. You can have the best metrics dashboard in the world, and without taking action, it will be a terrific seat to watch failure from.
The true power of a metric is to tell you early enough when you need to make changes, and what needs to be changed. If you’re measuring a marketing funnel, for example, every stage in the funnel past the first one has a cause and effect. The number of leads you generate is caused by how attractive your inbound marketing is or how effective your advertising is, and affects how many sales you make. If your business is in trouble for any reason, do what Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center advocates for martial artists: look to the immediate previous step to see the mistake you made and what to fix. Not enough sales? Check your lead flow. Not enough leads? Check your inbound audience numbers.
Ask these three questions in order to make sense of the many metrics and data points available to you. If you have a metric that fails the tests these questions ask, put it to the side and work on finding metrics that provide valuable answers to all three questions.
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Do you have a swipe file?
If you’ve not spent a lot of time around creative advertising and marketing folks, you may never have heard of a swipe file before now. A swipe file is a collection of stuff that has worked, arranged in such a way to inspire you and give you future ideas. Done properly, it can be one of the most valuable assets you can have to jumpstart your creativity.
So how would you go about creating such a creature? I’m a fan of Evernote, though certainly you can use any digital storage mechanism you like, such as Google Notebook or Docs.
Start by creating a simple organizational system designed around your creative blocks. Most folks working with swipe files tend to organize badly (if at all) and create a system that doesn’t solve the root problem of a writer’s/creator’s block.
Create a set of folders, notebooks, etc. labeled by your specific blocks. For example:
- Writer’s block
- Ad copy block
- Ad photo block
- Magazine headline block
- Email call to action block
- Ad layout block
- Blog post block
- Facebook Fan Page art block
- High contrast photo block
This way, whenever you’re working on a project and you can identify what kind of block you’re facing in your own mind, you can very quickly look to your swipe file for solutions. This is why most swipe files fail – they don’t address the actual problem you’re trying to solve, and thus you never learn to rely on it.
Once you’ve got the swipe file set up, start collecting materials. Set aside 5-10 minutes each day to pull stuff you’ve seen from the day (or previous day) into the relevant folders. Saw a great ad on the side of a bus that you snapped in your phone’s camera? Put it in the appropriate block file. Got an email that compelled you to buy something? Put it in the appropriate block file.
The key to a great swipe file is its contents – any time you see something that just makes you stop in your tracks, get it into your swipe file. That’s why I use services like Evernote – the phone app means that if I see a great ad while I’m out and about, I can capture it quickly and get it into the file, and the email forwarding function means I can just forward compelling messages straight to the file.
Set up and use a swipe file for a month to see how it can help you smash those blocks and keep your advertising and marketing efforts moving forward!
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Video: Chris Pirillo on why Empire Avenue works
For what I do in my work at Blue Sky Factory and personally, I still haven’t gotten much juice for the squeeze out of Empire Avenue, and that’s okay. I’m still learning and evaluating, but I got a chance to ask one of the heavy players of EAV about it at Blogworld: Chris Pirillo. Here’s what he had to say about what’s working, how it’s working, and his tips for getting started in a 9 minute video:
Can’t see the video? Watch it on the website.
Find Chris at his website, on Twitter, or buy his stock at (e)PIRILLO.
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Black Belts and Social Media
There’s a curious phenomenon that occurs in Japanese martial arts where a master teacher will sometimes promote a student to a higher rank before they’re ready, before they’ve earned it. In Japanese culture, honor and pride then dictate that the student work even harder to be worthy of the honor their teacher has given them, to truly earn the rank. It’s partially a sign of respect and partially a test by the teacher to see how self-aware the student is; in some cases, less self-aware students tend to believe they have earned their rank instead of understanding that they’ve been promoted as a means of motivation.
Where this system breaks down is when people who don’t share Japanese cultural norms get involved. If a non-Japanese person has the same experience, there’s a good chance they’ll end up believing they are better than they actually are, to the point where they become dangerous to themselves and others. They believe they have capabilities that aren’t really there. The more self-aware non-Japanese students will figure it out and fit into the cultural norm, working to be worthy of their rank. The less self-aware tend to self-destruct pretty spectacularly.
What does this have to do with social media? In any medium, especially new ones where the trail isn’t obvious, we tend to look for leaders. We tend to look for people to follow. We tend, in other words, to promote people in our heads and in our words before they’re ready. We may not do it for the same reason as a master teacher in the dojo, but the net effect is the same.
So what should we do about it? If we’re the ones doing the “promoting”, then call into question the results that we’ve gotten from following a person’s advice. Look carefully at the goals you’ve set down for yourself and if you’re not getting the juice you’re looking for, perhaps the person you’re following got promoted a little too early in your own head. Be aware of that and start searching out other people who are getting the results you want to achieve.
If we’re the ones being promoted too early by our peers, take the Japanese route. Be aware of what your “promotion” ahead of time is. Redouble your efforts to learn more, to grow more, to explore more, to eventually become worthy of the various labels that your peers have chosen to give you. Like in the dojo, there’s a very good chance you’ll be the last person to get the memo that you really are the black belt someone else has claimed you to be.
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