Video Monday 8: Have Something to Buy

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Transcript:
Sings: Video Monday, video Monday, it’s a Monday so here’s a video!

So today I thought I’d do just a very quick post about having something to sell. So we’ve talked about, and specifically about artists again, we’ve talked about having a story that people can really buy into. Something they can keep coming back and discovering new things about. Something they feel something emotional towards.

So these people, and I’m sure you’ve experienced it on the things that you read regularly, or the authors you really enjoy, the writers you really like, eventually you get to the point where you’ve bought into their story and you want to buy a piece of it. You wish there was some souvenir that you could actually have. And it can sometimes be frustrating if there’s a blog you love, but they don’t have a book, they don’t have a t-shirt, they don’t have anything that I can actually own part of. It can be a little frustrating.

So I thought I’d talk briefly about how obviously if you’re an artist people have bought into your story, your journey, being able to actually buy your art on your website is going to be kind of obvious. But if you’re someone else and you’ve just got a story that people really enjoy, there are three pretty good reasons to have something on your site that people can buy.

The first one is, and Seth Godin calls books souvenirs of ideas. Ideas are free. You’re giving them out for free on your blog all the time people want to have a souvenir of it. So what this means is, if someone actually owns something in the physical world that’s related to the ideas that you’ve been distributing on your blog it kind of takes your ideas and moves them into the real world. Where people can share a book with someone sooner than they can share a blog with someone who doesn’t read blogs regularly.That book sitting on your desk at work is now as Hugh Macleod would call a social object. Something that you can have a conversation about easier than you can have a conversation with a co-worker who doesn’t read blogs about those ideas.

Another reason, obviously it just, it gives you something you can make some money off of. The likelihood that most of us are going to get rich by selling an e-book on our blogs is pretty low, but it’s something.

And I would say another really strong reason is it makes your readers more attached to you. They are less likely to stop reading a blog that they own a piece of, they own the book, they own the t-shirt, then they are to someone that they haven’t given money to.

So those are just a couple of reasons to have something on your blog to sell. Whether it’s an e-book, a real book or a t-shirt, that sort of thing, and you can come up with better ideas than I can about what those things should be.

So all that said you might be wondering, so Joel, you have a blog that people read and you have nothing on your site that people can actually buy. So, an obvious caveat to this whole thing is that writing something worth people paying money for is really hard and it takes a long time. So I haven’t got to that place yet, so if you want to get to that place I suggest you start pretty soon, because it’s going to take awhile.

So that’s Video Monday, thanks everyone.

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