Dermot Crowley once posted a blog which got exactly zero likes or responses.
Months later, it started a conversation that landed a huge contract.
Someone read it, resonated with the message, then did absolutely nothing. On visible metrics the blog scored a fat zero. Then, after a chance real-life encounter in a lift, it delivered on THE metric. Money.
Most of us face some version of this dilemma:
- Content that grows your following is less likely to bring in business.
- Content that appeals to paying customers will likely reach fewer eyeballs.
There’s usually an inverse relationship between popularity and monetisation.
Alex M H Smith wrote about this last week (after we recorded this episode) with a sexy graph that neatly illustrates this idea. He makes the dubious claim of having limited growth himself AND HAS 96K FOLLOWERS, but we'll chalk that up to the English sense of humour. His stuff is great. https://lnkd.in/g-Tjwh3E
For those of us an order of magnitude behind, it’s helpful to be clear about what you want. What are your measures of success?
Col and I aren’t empirical about what we’re looking for, and we’re not crunching big numbers. There's no fancy sales funnel. We like having a laugh and prompting conversation between ourselves and others. We like making friends we might one day meet.
Sure we'd like a bigger audience. Who wouldn't?? But we don’t mind if the link between The Fink Tank and paying clients is indirect. Building relationships with stories and sibling silliness is fun. And the inbound leads are healthy.
Do you know what you’re looking for?
