Why John Reese Is Only Half Right IMO
Posted by Justin Brooke on June 19, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. like everyone else has. So you don't miss anything...
It’s exactly because of arguments like these that I have been changing over the whole way my business is perceived.
I agree with EVERYTHING John says in this post and he truly was the wrong target for these attacks.
However, we as Internet marketers need to appreciate the views of other people as a form of market research. Ballpark estimates say that half the Internet business world loves our “ebook seller” models and the other half hates it.
A good marketer should see that and think “Damn, half the Internet doesn’t like what I am doing. Maybe I can go see what they do like and model myself as a hybrid. So maybe I can get some leverage on that other half of the Internet.”
While I love John, Frank, Russell, Ed, Jeff, Eben, and all our other industry leaders just as much as the next guy. There are other marketers out there so big that their shadows can span across all our “gurus’ combined.
John Reese please don’t take this the wrong way…
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com makes over $250k per month with a BLOG and that blog has over 750,000 subscribers.
Kevin Rose of Digg.com receives over 25 million UNIQUES per month and is reported to have over 2 million registered users. Hows that for an email list!
Tom Anderson created a little website called Myspace.com and sold it for $580 million dollars to FOX. Myspace.com now has over 100 million registered users and gets paid 5 figures and more for ad campaigns from the largest companies in the world.
I could keep going with these facts for a long time. My point is that we as marketers should not be fighting this good fight but embracing it, analyzing it, and then capitalizing on it.
Who is it that is hating on us?
What is it that they don’t like?
How many of them are there?
What can I do to bring these people back?
Marketing and sales is at it’s core an “objection” search and destroy game. Then why are we as marketers not searching and destroying this “ebook sellers haters club” objections?
As you can tell I am very passionate about this as well as a good friend of mine Alejandro Reyes. We’ve been talking about this very topic for about a month now. Our websites, marketing, and characters are adapting because of it.
The result is we’re pulling in brand new partners on much higher levels then ever before. Love to talk about this more with anyone who cares…
Thanks for listening,
Justin Brooke
EDIT: This was not meant to show John Reese in any kind of a bad light. I am a raving fan of Reese’s work and certainly he is a legend in our industry. This was mainly directed at a lot of us who are still on our way up in the industry. Showing that we as an industry have the ability, and in my opinion the responsibility, to analyze why we have a stigma in so many peoples eyes. Then take actions to correct that.
Justin,
I found your post after following the link in the comments on mine.
Umm… I currently make a lot more money than Michael Arrington does with his blog. But who cares? What’s the point? I wasn’t attempting to compare myself with anyone else. My whole post was in defending myself again someone’s personal attacks on me as well as making generalizations against marketers in general.
And for the record… aside from the Web entrepreneurs that successfully have sold their startups (like Tom Anderson, the YouTube guys, etc.) many Internet marketers NET far more money than they do. Eben Pagan is doing $20,000,000 a year by selling information products that have a 90%+ margin. Do the math. Most of those startup companies on the net, while they might have big traffic and users, ARE LOSING MILLIONS.
Again, I don’t mean to put others down based on what they make, etc. But if you’re going to try and make that argument to compare “who’s more successful as a marketer” you need to do it based on PROFIT and not just the potential to hopefully one day be bought by Google.
But either way, it’s a silly comparison.
Hey John,
Thanks for coming by… I hate that textual communication is so easily misunderstood. I in no way was trying to say that you are not one of the big dogs.
Also of course us “ebook sellers” have a much better business model in my eyes. Our profit margins are delicious as well as returns on investments.
All I was trying to say is that we need to show the rest of the world that that is exactly why our business models are so great. And if all they see is that we are “ebook sellers” and some even think of us as scammers.
Then we are not doing our jobs at showing people how great our business models are and that they should be coming over to our side. I am a lover of our industry and want to do as much as I can to bring the respectability to it.
Here’s my point….
Imagine if Internet marketers could harness the same followings that “the other guys” get with our high profit margins.
If I had 750,000 subscribers to my blog or any experienced “ebook seller” I’m sure we could make much much more then $250k per month. We already get $1 per email subscriber and should be able to do the same with our blog subscribers.
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