Imagine …

Whenever a piece of content is created the author or publisher would add that content to a google index along with the rules for fair use of that content. For example, if I write a blog post I might label it as free to all. If I have a newsletter I might say it’s only free on my site and on my partner sites. I might make some content free provided it is accompanied by a specified ad. Or I might assign a use fee to it — a flat fee, or based on the number of views, or whatever.

When a legit site wants to find a useful piece of content, the content curator would search through the google content repository and find what they want, then see if the terms of use make sense for them. If they found some random article they wanted to use they could post a snippet into the search to find out who created it and the terms for use.

There’d be no need to hunt down authors, negotiate fees or any of that. You could do it all through the google tool.

Then, as the Google web crawler searched the internet, it would compare all content on all pages against that index and check to see if the rules are being followed. If it found a violation it would remove that site from its search results, send a notification to the site owner and to the content author, and also to a copyright enforcement agency.

I get so many emails and calls from people who think that I’m sitting around eager to “jump on a quick call” with some salesman.

Believe me, folks, that is not a benefit. If that’s the lead of your email or your call, you need to go back to marketing 101.

I’ve had a fair amount of experience preparing speakers for audio conferences, webinars and in-person events. Over the years I’ve learned a few tricks of the trade. Here are a few of them.

Get an outline early

If you’re organizing a presentation, you have some sense of what you want the speaker to say. You need to make sure you and the speaker agree on that.

Many speakers wait until the last minute to do their slides, but they are usually willing to give you a simple outline early, which is a good way to compare notes on the content of the presentation. Think about the key points you want the speaker to cover and make sure you mention them and where you think they’ll fit in the outline.

Getting an outline early is especially important when you have multiple speakers. In addition to the points above, you want to make sure there’s no duplication.

Ask the speakers to come up with one or two key takeaways from their session

This helps the speaker focus the presentation. Most attendees expect to get one or two actionable items from the session. Make sure the speaker knows he has to deliver on that promise.

If you’re not confident of the speaker, do the session as a Q&A

It’s best to get a speaker you’ve heard before. It’s awful when you’re half-way through a webinar or in-person session and you realize your speaker is too quiet, says “um” all the time, rambles, or has some other distraction. (There are lots of ways to ruin a public presentation.)

Speaking on the phone can help diagnose some of this, but it’s not a good enough test run for a public speaker.

If you’re using a new speaker, try a Q&A — with you asking the questions. The speaker can provide the questions in advance, but this format gives you a little more control so you can compensate for problems.

Get a print-out of the slides and establish timing expectations

If the talk will be 45 minutes, divide up the content into 10- or 15-minute increments so you can make sure things are moving along at a decent pace. You don’t need to be a time Nazi, but you don’t want to get in a situation where you have 5 minutes left and have only done half your presentation, or have 30 minutes left and have breezed through all your slides.

Review the slides ahead of time

The people in the audience know how to read, so the speaker should not read the slides. Look for signs of that in the slide deck and remind the speaker not to do it.

Sometimes it’s better to have slides with simple headlines or pictures — with very few words.

The exception, of course, is if the presentation includes practical tools, like checklists. That stuff is golden, so by all means include those in the slide deck. Just remind the speaker not to read them.

Break up the monotony of one voice

Some people are very interesting speakers, but it’s usually difficult to listen to the same voice for a long time — especially when you can’t see the person’s face.

Break things up. Have a couple speakers take turns, or make sure the presenter solicits questions throughout. You can also ask some of the questions yourself.

Magazine readership is growing, which is a good thing. And as you might expect, digital readership is growing much faster than print.

But it still remains a trivial part of the business.

Although digital readership still makes up a tiny piece of the pie — measuring 1.4 percent of all magazine readership — it continues to grow rapidly.

Panic, panic, we’re missing the boat! We have to do an app! We have to go digital! Hurry, hurry, or you’ll be left behind!

Baloney. The death of print has been trumpeted for years, and it’s still not happening. If you want 1.4 percent more customers, you’d be far better off fixing your renewal series than worrying about digital.

The internet has lowered the barrier to entry to many markets. Anybody can publish a book, sell t-shirts or coffee mugs, or become their own record company. But launching a new product or service from nothing doesn’t happen by magic. Your book can be “out there” … and not sell.

What’s the secret? How do successful entrepreneurs push through and find success?

I want to find out, so I’m going to start interviewing some people who have made (or are making) the transition from a regular full-time job to working for themself. Here’s the first in what I hope will be an on-going series. This is my interview with Tina Henry of Tina Seamonster.

Tina is one of the most creative and hard-working people that I know, and she’s built a business from scrap. Literally.

Q: If you had to pick one thing that has been the secret of your success, what would it be?

A: Say yes to things you are afraid of. This has happened to me many times, but the best example was when in 2008 a big book store chain asked me to make fridge magnets to match the bookmarks they were already selling.

I had no idea how to manufacture a fridge magnet, but I said yes anyway. I did the research about getting a factory to make them, but then figured out that I could buy the machines and do it myself cheaper. I invested in the machines (with a loan from my brother) and started on the order all on my own. That first order was for 5,000 fridge magnets. I made them in 3 weeks.

Many many people told me I couldn’t do this. Many many people told me to pass. That first order paid for the machines and I paid my brother back a month later. Since then I have delivered around 30,000 magnets to stores around the world. Since then I have learned how to get them manufactured, as well, also opening up a whole new world for my business.

Q: How did you learn to be successful in your business? What did you read, who did you talk to, etc.?

A: I would say I learned to be successful through my own failures. Many many people stop after one failure. I am just not made that way. I fail and I try something else. I press on. I firmly believe that you have to fail way more than you want to before you will succeed.

Q: How long did it take for you to transition from full-time employment to full-time self employment?

A: Because my business is often seasonal, about 50% of my sales happen between September and December, I still work part time a few hours a day as a web contractor. I do this because I have twins and live in DC. If I lived in Ohio on my own, it would be a different story. I also love to travel abroad, so the extra work helps pay for that.

So I am technically fully self-employed, but I do a few different jobs. When your business is selling a product, you have to always be ready to make money doing something else. It is just something that you can’t get worried about. So in some ways, I just made this decision and there was no transition, but in other ways, I am still making the transition. This means I don’t work a normal week. I work everyday.

Q: Marketing depends on “reach.” In the old days that meant foot traffic, or viewers, or lists of phone numbers or addresses. Now it might mean Twitter followers or Facebook fans. How do you reach your customers with your product, and what did you have to do to develop that “list”?

A: I spent a lot time cultivating Twitter and Facebook, etc, but found that those things became too personal for me. I couldn’t separate myself from these forms of marketing. And doing so would have made me seem fake. So I have mostly given up on Twitter, and Facebook is just for real friends and long time fans. I don’t want to be that person asking people to “like” things.

A big marketing tool for me has been selling my products wholesale. I sell my products wholesale to the Books a Million bookstore chain and so people see and buy my products in 225 stores across the US. Many of those people will seek me out in person at a show or come directly to my website to buy more. Each piece that goes to the store is marketing if it is branded well.

I also sell products in yarn stores across the US and that is getting a niche group of people to notice me. Then there are online wholesale sites like Fab.com. A sale on Fab.com means that my products and brand go out to millions of people in their emails. I can sell 300 items in a the course of 3 days, but I can reach the eyes of 3 million.

For me as a real person, these 3rd party experiences are better. I didn’t know this at first, but luckily I do now. I don’t need to spend my day creating fake relationships with faceless people on Twitter, I can manage 1 message rather than hundreds of little ones.

Q: Are there any third-party services that have been helpful to you?

Etsy.com has been invaluable as a storefront. Finding the right supplies for whatever you make is also really really important.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge in working for yourself?

The biggest challenge is not knowing what will happen next. I hate not knowing the future. I hate seeing sales slowing down and getting worried all the time about it. Many many people will quit for this reason, but I feel like great opportunities comes my way because I keep at it, I say yes to things that are scary and I learn from my failures.

… and one other thing …

Always find a way to help others with what you do. I am a big believer that you get from the world what you give to it. I sell bookmarks to bookstores, but in recent years those sales have slowed. So I decided to start a project giving the excess bookmarks to schools and public libraries. The project then changed into letting other people design those bookmarks. I will be giving away 10,000 bookmarks to schools and public libraries this year (have given away 4000 so far) and the return on the investment has been really fantastic.

I hear all the time from librarians about how kids are so excited to read and use the bookmarks because they are so fun and interesting. Sure, it doesn’t sound like much, but librarians are always looking for incentives to give kids who read more and they often spend time and money to print out bookmarks themselves. You can find that project at www.readwithfriendsproject.com.

Just about every day there are stories about how print is dead, publishers need to be on tablets, digital publishing is the future, and if you don’t hurry up you’ll be left behind.

It is certainly true that readers are consuming more and more content on digital platforms. On Amazon.com, sales of eBooks exceed sales of printed books in many markets, and in other segments of the publishing industry consumers often prefer digital delivery to print delivery.

It is not at all clear that trend will continue.

The cost of print is generally estimated to be no more than 8 percent of the publisher’s cost of bringing content to market. Many costs — author fees, overhead, marketing, etc. — are the same whether you deliver print or pixels. Furthermore, in some cases creating a digital version of content can add costs.

Yet consumers expect digital to cost much less. They think publishers save a lot of money on printing, and consumers think they ought to benefit from the savings with a lower price.

If all this is true, why are the prices so out of whack? If you look at the difference in price between a paperback and an eBook, it’s far more than 8 percent. The fairly obvious conclusion is that prices are not accurately reflecting costs. In the current market, the printed edition of a title is subsidizing the digital edition.

Sooner or later that is going to have to change, and when it does — when the price difference between the eBook and the paper book is roughly 8 percent plus shipping — will sales of eBooks keep going at the pace they’re going now? I don’t think so.

The ugly truth is that for all the hype about digital publishing, very few publishers are actually making any money at it.

Here’s the first sentence from The digital tinkering continues – and that’s a good thing.

Revenues may finally be catching up with the investments publishers have been making in their digital businesses.

I’m reminded of two proverbs — “Fools rush in,” and “A fool and his money are soon parted.” Of course proverbs are tricky. There’s also “He who hesitates is lost” and “Cast your bread upon the waters,” so … be careful about that sort of thing.

Still, it seems to me that the wise course is to look for easy, cheap, obvious wins on the digital front, and to allow publishers with money to burn to experiment. Sooner or later they’ll stumble on the right solution, and then we can all imitate them.

But most of all, don’t be fooled by the digital hype. Look at the numbers. They’re not all that great.

… Especially when it’s the latest marketing / digital thing.

Remember when publishers were first creating apps and putting content on tablets and mobile devices? The mantra was “it has to be interactive. It can’t just be the print product on a device.”

Well … maybe not.

What I’m hearing is that interactivity is over-rated.

People want to play Angry Birds, but they want to read your magazine.

Sure, they want links to work and basic stuff like that, but you don’t need to worry so much about interactivity.

A colleague sent me an email today about the use of numbers. When you use a number, people are more likely to believe you. For example, if you say “a lot of people drive old cars,” that’s not as impressive as if you say “37.4% of the population drives a car that is older than 10 years.”

Of course I just made up those numbers, but if I were to say that, you’d probably believe it, because why would I use a precise number if it weren’t true? Or, put another way, using a number lends credibility to what you’re saying.

The same thing holds with sales messages. If you use a number, people are more likely to listen.

There are lots of tricks like that, and if you’re in marketing you probably know some of them.

Use a testimonial. Use a compelling photo. Use bullets and subheads in the text. On and on it goes.

If you’re trying to get one sale and be done, and you don’t care if the person actually wants or needs what you’re selling, then those tactics make sense.

But what if you want to build a brand? What if you want people to trust you? What if you want to sell a subscription, and you want the person to renew next year because they actually like the product?

In those cases, do these tactics help? If I trick someone into buying something they don’t like, I get their money today, but is it good in the long run?

I’m not only referring to sleazy sales tactics. Even if you avoid the really awful stuff, you still want to use tactics that work in your marketing copy.

How do you know if you’re fulfilling a real need with a good product, or if you’re creating a false sense of need with a marketing trick?

I’ve wondered if companies should track this sort of thing. If your business model relies on renewals or repeat sales, then tactics that get the first sale, but don’t result in long-term customers, aren’t doing you any good.

In the subscription publishing business it’s common to lose money on the first year’s sale, hoping to make it up on renewals. That assumes that the person really wants the publication and will renew. (Of course you can trick them into renewing as well, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.)

Let’s pretend that you’re in an honest business, that you believe in the value of your product and that you only want to sell to people who genuinely benefit from your magazine. You’re not trying to fool anybody, but at the same time you know that certain tactics work better. That’s not an intrinsically evil thing. If you use stupid tactics, the market isn’t going to hear your message or consider your product, which is, in fact, a good thing for them.

So where do you draw the line between “good marketing practices” and “cheap psychological tricks”? And how do you know which ones are actually helping you in the long run?

As a somewhat trite example, consider two salesmen.

The first is attractive, well-spoken and well-groomed, and closes lots of sales, but gets a lower renewal rate. People are buying because they’re taken in by his good looks.

The second is not attractive, a little sloppy and a little awkward. He doesn’t close many sales, but everybody who buys from this guy renews.

Is it worth tracking such things? How would you do it? Are you going to mark every email campaign with some sort of sliding scale of “marketing trickery”? Will you note each sales record with the attractiveness of the salesman?

It’s an interesting dilemma. The only thing I can think of is recording the response rate of the effort that brought in the sale, and then comparing that to the renewal rate.

To make this simple, assume you’re selling magazines by email. Every email effort has a response rate. You could attach the response rate of the effort to the order, then see if there is a correlation between the response rate and the renewal rate.

If you’re tricking people into buying a product they don’t want, then — all other things being equal, which they never are — higher response rate campaigns would correlate with lower renewal rates.

It’s hard for a month to pass without hearing some desperate cry — either from an app developer or from a “business development” guy who wants to spend your money on an app developer — about how mobile is taking over and everybody has to switch to mobile or they might as well be selling buggy whips and whale oil lamps.

Don’t believe it.

It’s certainly true that mobile devices are surging. One in three Americans owns a smartphone, and one in five owns a tablet.

Worldwide, mobile devices account for 10 percent of web traffic, although that’s somewhat skewed towards Asia and Africa. In the U.S. it’s about 8%.

So … look! 8%! Panic, now! You can’t afford to ignore 8 percent of your market? Quick, develop an app!

Not so fast. Let’s stop and think about that 8 percent.

First, most people who have a mobile device also have (or have access to) a desktop or laptop computer, so you’re not necessarily losing them if you’re not on mobile.

Second, people do different things on different devices. A smartphone is great for taking pictures and posting them to Facebook, for getting your email on the go, or for checking the status of your flight, but you’re not going to do serious research or authoring on the thing. A smartphone is simply not a productivity device, and despite the Apple ads, neither is an iPad. (Although it’s closer.)

Third, fragmentation in the mobile space makes it difficult to get all of those people. Apple or Android? Smartphone or tablet? What screen size? Will you be on e-readers? It’s a mess, and you have to choose the right target.

So … should you develop a mobile website or an app? Maybe. It depends on your market and on what kind of service you offer.

If you run a truck that delivers cup cakes or lobster roles or something, you should definitely be on twitter. People want updates. (At least people who like cupcakes do — so they tell me.)

Twitter is a great tool for certain kinds of business. That doesn’t mean Twitter is great for every business.

I’m in publishing, so I don’t really care about the best business model for people who sell lobster rolls out of trucks. I mean, God bless ’em, but … it doesn’t help me.

Publishers need to heed Douglas Adams’ advice.

If you want to keep up with the Jones’ and you’re just dying to hang with the cool kids and show off your app at cocktail parties, please go right ahead and spend lots of money on mobile development. I’ll help you on evenings and weekends if you’d like.

But if you want to be sensible about it, here are some practical steps to help you plan a mobile strategy.

1. Check your web statistics. How much traffic are you getting from mobile right now? Remember, generalized stats about “mobile usage” include Facebook and Pinterest and stuff that doesn’t apply to you and probably never will.

2. While you’re looking at your web stats, see if you really have a problem. Compare the pages per visit, time on site, abandon rate, etc., of people on mobile to the same stats for people on desktops. Be sure to segment out your paying customers if you can. If there’s no clear difference in behavior, what is the problem you’re trying to solve?

3. Only pay attention to stats for mobile use in your demographic. If you serve 23-year olds you’re going to look on mobile very differently than if you serve 60-year olds.

4. While you’re looking at those demographics, find out which devices are most popular. Remember, generalized stats don’t help you. Do people in your target market prefer iPads or iPhones?

5. Do something really radical and ask your customers. Survey them. Do they even want to get your stuff on a mobile device? (Remember, “would you like?” is a very different thing from “give me money for X,” but you can still get some indication of interest.)

6. Check with customer service. Have people been asking for this? (Remember, if one person complains that’s often a crisis for customer service. Make sure to get some numbers.)

7. Try something easy first. There are lots and lots of services out there that will put your content on their platform for a cut of ad or subscription revenue. Maybe you should try that and see if anybody cares.

The online world is all about segmentation. Before you go crazy with apps, look at the segments that matter to you and see if a mobile solution would really help.

Did you see the scene in Minority Report where the Tom Cruise character is walking through a shopping mall and all the stores are identifying him (by a retina scan, I think) and then delivering custom messages?

A lot of people fear that kind of stuff. They get worried that the local grocery store knows they have a pet cat, or that Google knows which web sites they’ve visited.

I agree there is some cause for concern over the proliferation of personal data, but I can also see an upside.

I don’t want advertisements for dog food or commercials for “adult” movies or emails telling me where I can get my latest horoscope.

But aside from that relatively trivial stuff, I would like to be able to see what I want to know about a product. For example, if I’m interested in a coat, the first thing I do is look at the price tag. If it’s not in the range I’d want to pay, I lose all interest.

Other people don’t shop like that. They want to see how it looks, and whether it has a special jelly bean pocket, and whatever else is important to them, and if it has enough fancy features they like they’re willing to pay a premium for it.

Marketers decide how to display / sell a product based on averages. They do tests — e.g., show it this way to half the market and this other way to the other half of the market and see which method works better.

That maximizes sales, but it also forces all of us to put up with that same sales technique.

This weekend I got an email advertising a roundtable discussion on digital marketing issues. I clicked through to find out what it was about and had to put up with a really annoying video — obnoxious music in the background, jargon-laden nonsense about the product, etc.

That stuff doesn’t work with me. I want to know what it is and how much it costs. If the presentation doesn’t answer that question in the first 20 seconds, I’m gone. That’s how I treat sales people who call me on the phone, and that’s my expectation for videos.

Obviously I’m not in the majority. Other methods must be working better in the target market for these services.

Maybe some time in the future some really good personalization will solve this. Everybody else can get the fluffy stuff and I can get the fact-based presentation I want.