Or when someone tells you that $3000 Cdn a month can buy you exclusive sponsorship to a blog marketing individual courage and fearlessness that gets millions of hits say yes.
See my other posts on We’re Not Afraid here, here, here and here. See also my post on What The Islamic Terrorists Want.
Lessons Learned
1. If you have a good idea follow your intuition like Alfie did.
You can do amazing things and get a lot of people involved. They have 10,000 photos sent in to the site from people around the world. There are 1181 blogs that linked to the We’re Not Afraid Blog from Blogs Now blog directory. The blog’s getting 4 million hits a day. Alfie’s had interviews on CNN, BBC, ABC and Fox TV (it’s TV, news implies certain things that aren’t applicable in their case). He’s not alone, according to ABC news he’s got 8 people on 3 continents helping to process the massive volume of photo submission.
I hear the next article the Alfie might be writing is “How to build a global brand in less than a week”. That may come before or after the “How to take a blog from 0 hits to 4 million hits a day in less than 2 weeks.”
Do you think if he want’s to quit his day job, he’ll have trouble finding work?
1. Read emails of bloggers even if they’re not A list bloggers.
They may have something useful for you.
2. Monitor the blogosphere.
While there is a lot of dross out there, there are also some gems that can be great business opportunities.
3. Kindness can create cash.
If you decided to sponsor the We’re not Afraid blog created by Alfie Dennen just because you thought they were doing something useful and a socially important thing and wanted to help them because you thought it will help others around the world, you’d have a blog/website that has your logo as the solo sponsor that gets 4 million hits a day, maybe more in the future. Compare one advertiser getting 4 million daily hits for $2450 US to being one of 8 on a blog getting 550,000 daily hits for $16k (Daily Kos). Detailed expanation here. If only 1 out of a hundred visitors clicked through to your site you’d get 40,000 unique hits a day. Put up some Google ads and that alone would generate enough revenue to pay for it give you a 3-5 times or much more return on investment, leaving aside the goodwill benefits.
4. Create your own blog for your business and let your clients know about it.
You can only read so many newspapers; one of the advantages of blogs is that bloggers are natural collectors and publishers of information. They’re essentially extending your (and your clients reach) informational reach exponentially. How grateful might one of your clients be if they read your post on this topic and seized the opportunity and became the sponsor?
Why did 24 out of 27 UK PR Bloggers that I sent an email on this topic ignore it? What do you think their clients might think of them know if they knew?
3. If you read about an opportunity, don’t just look for reasons to reject it, look for reasons to say yes.
One of the things that frustrated me about emailing this out to more than 100 bloggers, other groups of bloggers and dealing with some of the doubters on the WordPress support forums (they weren’t all doubters some of them were more than helpful like WordPress support guru Podz who spent a ton of his time helping with the technical end of a blog getting 4 million hits a day was that to me this was a business no brainer. It seemed so obvious it was a golden opportunity even if you had no conscience and just wanted to make money, you should have jumped on it quick.
4. Have someone with ADD to monitor the blogosphere if you’re lucky enough to have one of us creative, energetic types with rapid fire brains on staff.
ADDers are natural bloggers and consumers of blogs. Here are some reasons why.
Easily distractible= you notice more things that others do.
Rapid fire mind= able to process a large amount of material quickly and make the appropriate connections.
Great multitasker= monitor many things at a time
Able to see connections that other miss= notice more possible business opportunities
Impulsive= able to make quick decisions
5. Those in business that wait on emerging trends become roadkill.
Some opportunities you may want to spend some time considering. Others, you need to be able to move right away, especially those that involve popular current events and harness the power of courage and hope and appeal to people all over the globe from all political and religious persuasions (except fanatical suicide bombers and their apologists).
6. Helping out a good cause can make you feel really good.
While I only did a tiny amount of work compared to Alfie and his friends who worked around the clock on the blog, helping out on a project that you thought was important, helpful and inspiring for others can make you feel really good. It’s a lot more productive than:
- Feeling afraid, helpless and paralysed. Feeling that many media outlets are trying to create, since for many media companies, marketing fear helplessness and anxiety is a business model.
- Cursing the darkness impotently, or doing what the terrorist want you to do, attack innocent Muslims so Osama Bin Laden can get more recruits for his cause.
- Or just feeling useless and fatalistic, i.e., there’s nothing I can do.
You can make a difference.
If you want to make a difference download one of the blog buttons and put it on your blog, blog about the site, or buy some merchandise from their cafepress shop
which will go to server and admin costs, the rest (approx 35% of list price)will be donated to the Red Cross London Bomb Relief Fund.
We will transparently publish costs and the amount raised from sales via this shop, so you know we are not profiting from others loss.
You can also send them your picture saying you’re not afraid.
Can anyone think of any others?