Hyping something up basically means promoting it (usually before it is publicly available) in an attempt to get people interested, so when you do make it available they’ll be ready to buy it. An example of this is a movie studio announcing a movie a year in advance, and maybe releasing a very short preview trailer so people who see it will say “whoa, that looks badass, I definitely wanna see that.” In my experience, I’ve found there are three ways to hype something up that are all useful depending on what your product is:

• Hyping it a long time in advance: Giving the public a short sample (or even just putting the word out) a few months to a year in advance is a good way to generate interest so people will be consistently looking forward to it and excited to buy it when it’s released. This is typically done with movies, not so much websites and blogs. The downside is people will be excited when they first hear about it but will often lose interest as the hype dies down and it’s not the new and exciting thing anymore.
• Hyping it right before launch: Hyping something right before launch (”right before” meaning anything from a few days to a month, depending on what the product is) is the perfect time to generate interest, because it will be “new and exciting” and people will be ready to buy it. Promoting it just before launch means they don’t have time to lose interest. The downside of this is it might be too late for some people. If you’re selling an expensive product, they might have just bought something else and you’re giving them no time to save up enough to buy yours. If you’re promoting an event, they might have already made plans.
• Not hyping it at all: This is typically done if you’re trying to make your product “exclusive,” such as a snobby day spa or high end nightclub. People want what they can’t have and if they know it’s exclusive, they’ll assume it’s better than a nonexclusive place and want in. The downside of this is that you’re essentially limiting your marketing to such a small scale and relying on word of mouth as your primary strategy. I wouldn’t advise using this model unless your business is targeted at the rich and (for lack of a better word) snobby crowd.

So which model should you use? Continue Reading »

Business skills 101: don’t be lazy. Sounds obvious, right? It should be, but so many people can’t seem to grasp the idea that if you don’t work, you don’t make money. I used to work in the entertainment industry, doing music production and party promotion and while it was fun, it was very stressful. I had to work with a lot of rappers and let me tell you right now, rappers are the laziest people you will ever meet. In all my experience, I only met a couple that I actually liked, out of hundreds. Let’s look at some reasons why I hate them so much and how you can learn from their mistakes:

• They’re always late: It doesn’t matter if they’re about to have the most important meeting of their life, they’ll be late. You can call to check in with them as many times as you want, but they’ll still figure out a way to be late. Even if you go to their house to pick them up, they’ll take a long time figuring out what to wear and end up being late anyway. Being late is one of the best ways to show that you’re unprofessional and to lose business deals and money. Never be late and never make people wait, because people hate waiting.
• They’re irresponsible: They don’t get stuff done. I remember one occasion where I found an unsigned artist I liked and was planning to take him to a million dollar studio to record some demo tracks. He was almost an hour late and when he got there he didn’t have anything ready to go. Obviously if you’re going to a studio to record, you need to write some songs so you’re ready to record. You don’t pay for studio time so you can sit there and write your songs on the clock. If you want to be successful, you have to get things done, and you don’t want your business associates thinking you’re irresponsible or they won’t want to work with you.
• They’re hard to reach: For some reason they like carrying the most expensive phones but they don’t like answering them. If people can’t reach you, how are you going to take care of business? You can’t. Make sure people can reach you when they need to. I recently wrote a post about Ari Gold, a character from the show Entourage. He carries two phones, a main phone and a “bat phone” for emergencies. He always answers his main phone so the bat phone isn’t even really necessary, but he still has it just incase. Be like that.
• They mooch: Rappers are the ultimate parasites. They don’t like paying for anything and they even get mad if people won’t spend money on them. They think they’re the most important things in the universe and it’s impossible to reason with them. They don’t like listening to other people’s opinions and rather than having educated discussions, if someone doesn’t agree with them, they won’t even pay attention. First, people hate mooches, and if you know any mooches I’m sure you’ll agree. After awhile no one wants to be around them and no one pays any attention to them. People also hate people who don’t know how to discuss business. Saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” isn’t discussing - it just makes you look like a fool. Listen to other people’s opinions and take in as much as possible.

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“You have to spend money to make money.” There’s a lot of debate as to whether this is actually true, and I’m here to tell you that it is. You have to spend money to make money. You don’t have to spend a lot, but you do have to spend some. Let’s say you’re a singer and you want to send a demo to Universal in an attempt to get a record deal. Would you record it on your laptop’s built in microphone, or would you dish out a few hundred dollars for professional studio time and mixing? Hopefully, you’d pay for the studio time, because if an A&R hears pops and crackles coming from your mic, they’ll assume that you aren’t serious enough about your music to pay for studio time, and you won’t get a deal. Let’s take a look at some common expenses that come with starting a website or blog, and decide whether you should spend money on them, or save it for something else:

• Domain and hosting: If you want to start a website, you could save some money and throw it up on a free host, or you could use a Wordpress.com hosted blog. You don’t even need to buy a domain name, just use the myname.freehost.therestofthelongurl.com. The problem with this is if you’re using a free host and don’t own your own domain, your site looks very unprofessional. Very. If you’re trying to sell something, it’s even worse, because people won’t believe that it’s a legitimate business. Just spend the $10 for the domain and $5 a month for the cheapest hosting you can get, and you’re good to go. That’s $70 for an entire year of business, and don’t try to say you can’t afford $70 a year. VERDICT: SPEND MONEY FOR A DOMAIN AND HOSTING
• Advertising: Paying for advertising isn’t essential, but it helps. Most likely you’ll either use Adwords pay per click or you’ll buy a link on another site that has more traffic than yours. These are both good methods although I don’t really like to use PPC marketing unless I’m selling something and making direct revenue. In reality, you don’t really need to pay for advertising, because there are lots of great methods to generate traffic to your site. Social networks such as Digg, Twitter, and Facebook are good places to start. Commenting on other blogs is a good idea, and even telling your friends is good - it’s free, so you really have nothing to lose, and if you have good content there’s a chance they’ll tell their friends too. VERDICT: DON’T SPEND MONEY FOR ADVERTISING [UNLESS YOU HAVE MONEY TO BLOW]
• Design: Is paying a web designer to design your site worth it, or should you just use a free theme or template? Yes, it is definitely worth it. Most good designers will charge somewhere in the $1500-3500 range for a nice blog design, and yeah it sounds like a lot of money, but it’s worth it. Using a free template looks unprofessional and usually the free templates aren’t that good looking anyway. You want your site to look nice because if it looks like bullshit, first time visitors will be a lot more likely to dismiss it and never come back. I encourage everyone to spend money on a good design. If you can’t afford four figures, you can find competent designers who will do it for a few hundred - it won’t look as good as a more expensive design, but it will look better than a free design. VERDICT: SPEND MONEY FOR A DESIGN

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Brian Campbell of the “Internet Marketing University” recently launched a Facebook group in which his goal was to recruit as many people as possible which would in turn generate $10,000 for him within a month. How this money would appear, he didn’t say, although he did send out regular updates about how much he had made. These updates included no proof or additional information as to where this money came from, but hey, it’s Brian Campbell, and he’s a trustworthy guy, so who needs proof?

I’m a naturally untrusting and skeptical person so I didn’t immediately buy into it, but I joined at the beginning to see what it was about. At that time, he had published 3 videos that were supposed to explain to us how to follow his actions and in turn make our own $10,000 in 1 month. Whether these videos were informative or not we’ll never know, because they’re all ridiculously long and the first 10 minutes of the one I watched was just him sitting on his couch talking about how he has so many Facebook friends and how he’s excited about making so much money. He also went on to say, “It’s killing me that I can’t share all this information with you now” and that we’d have to subscribe and keep checking back for updates. Come on now. Who here believes that it’s really killing him? Why can’t he share it now? If he has time to record an hour long video of him talking about how rich he is, why doesn’t he have time to record a 5 minute video talking about how he’s going to make that money?

So I assumed that this guy is just trying to build up subscribers and then reveal the information. A lot of marketers would do something like that and there’s not really anything wrong with it, other than the fact that I wasted 10 minutes watching him sit on his couch when I could have been rubbing one out. Anyway, I stay in his Facebook group for about a week and a half and during that time he sends almost daily updates (read: “spam”) telling us about his progress and how much money he’s made. Finally, he hits the $10,000 mark and he says he’s now going to reveal his methods. It’s about motherfucking time. Now here’s where he fucked up (even more than he had already fucked up, and he had fucked up pretty bad so that’s saying a lot). Rather than presenting his knowledge in the Facebook group, he decides it would be better to make people pay a $30 a month subscription fee to access the information. Nice, Brian. Nice. I’m willing to bet that AT LEAST 90% of the people in that group now hate Brian Campbell and will never visit his site again. Let’s take a look at the mistakes he made so we can learn from them and ensure that we never make those same mistakes:

• Promising something and not delivering: If you promise something and then don’t deliver, you automatically lose all credibility and respect, and in turn, you lose business. I’m sure he was thinking that he’d suck people in, get them interested, and then when he tells them they have to pay, they’d already be so interested that they’d cough up the $30 no problem. However, there is a problem. The problem is people don’t like to be “tricked,” and this guy’s plan really wasn’t that sneaky. If I were subscribed to his blog before, I would have unsubscribed after this stunt, because I’d be under the impression that this is all he’s going to do in the future and I wouldn’t trust him anymore.

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blow: cocaine in it’s powdered state

Drug dealing is a very profitable business but as you probably know, it comes with a huge risk: going to jail and/or dying. Some risk, huh? To most people, it just isn’t worth it, and that’s why the ones who do decide to do it usually end up either wildly rich or totally screwed. A friend of mine was in the business for three years and had figured out how to consistently pull in about $3000 a week working about 1 hour a week. “1 hour a week???” Yup, 1 hour a week, and I’m going to show you how he did it. Let’s keep in mind that I’m not advocating this line of work or encouraging you to do anything illegal, I’m just presenting it so you can see into a sophisticated business model that will hopefully give you some ideas for how to manage your own business.

Most people imagine small dealers as people who stand on the street corner with plastic bags and sell them to junkies walking by. In reality it doesn’t work like this and anyone who did something stupid like that would be arrested within a few hours. When my friend started his business, he partnered with another friend who was as hard working as he was, and they each worked twelve hour shifts, every single day. No one knew who they were or how good their product was so they had to make their mark. They did this by giving out free samples along with “business cards” with their phone number (a separate phone they had set up under someone else’s name). J’s (another word for junkies/customers/buyers) realized that they had good product and reasonable prices, so they started calling their line to buy from them. In this type of business, along with many others such as blogging, it doesn’t matter how established your brand name is - so long as your product is good, people will buy it. Their days consisted of answering calls and driving to meet people, and he said it was the most boring thing he’d ever done, but the money was enough to stay motivated.

Eventually his business partner got arrested which left him in control. He was now making 100% of the profits but also had to work all day every day, sleeping for a few minutes here and there whenever he could. He said it was totally ridiculous and he had to find someone to work for him. It started with him hiring one of his friends to split up the days with, just like it was when he started, but this time he was in charge and he paid his worker a commission on each sale, rather than splitting up the profits 50/50. This way he was earning a lot more money. After awhile he found another worker so they could further split up the days into eight hour shifts, which was a lot more reasonable and everyone was happy. He told me a lot of interesting stories but since they don’t really relate to the theme of this site I’ll leave them out. Eventually he ended up with four workers, each working six hour shifts while he sat at home and watched TV. All he had to do was buy the product from his supplier, break it down, give it to his workers, and sit back while they made money for him. When they ran out of product, he’d repeat the process. That sounds pretty appealing, doesn’t it?

In addition to not having to work, he was also able to stay involved in a high profit business while minimizing his risk. If he’s working 1 hour vs. 12 hours, there’s a lot less chance of getting caught. In fact, since he was now only dealing with his supplier and his workers and not doing any of the actual dealing himself, he was about as safe as he’d ever get. Having all this free time also meant he could start another line for a different product, go through the cycle with that and ultimately make twice as much money doing about the same amount of work.

What happened to him? Continue Reading »