Never try to tell a marketer there’s no way to sell someone. There is ALWAYS a way to sell someone anything, if you’re creative and good at it.

Case in point, ReadWriteWeb put up a piece about how it’s impossible to make money in the long tail.

Illustration by gapingvoid.

I disagree. In fact, I think you can “make money” anywhere, if you market the right way. Particularly for this discussion, I believe that “fun” is the key to marketing to the long tail.

Why? From my earlier post…

I’ve said this a million times. Tim Carter taught me this. People come to the Internet for two reasons…

1. To solve a problem. 2. To have fun.

Think about it. EVERY action you take online falls into one of those buckets. Really think about it.

Those two ideas have driven my decisions on how to blog, what businesses to create, what kind of videos to make, etc… I ask myself those two questions before I do anything.

ScratchBack, in my opinion, does both. But let’s get back to fun. Fun is HIGHLY overrated. Sure, fun may not be practical in the “making money online” world, but you know what? I don’t care, why, because it’s fun!

Sure, I want ScratchBack to be successful, and I chose to position the marketing of it as “fun” as opposed to “getting rich” because I truly believe that there is only so far you can go down the long-tail by pushing “get rich” stuff.

Cnet is right.

And creating that Long Tail content has never been primarily about making money.

Shoemoney wrote up a short review of my system ScratchBack.com where he said…

I think its a good looking widget that has a lot of potential. While its low risk to make something that is “fun” not many people are going to take it seriously.

I will fully admit that I built ScratchBack as a “fun” tool, with benefits. I’m being totally honest, it was NOT built as a “making money online” tool. Let me tell you why.

I’ve said this a million times. Tim Carter taught me this. People come to the Internet for two reasons…

1. To solve a problem.

2. To have fun.

Think about it. EVERY action you take online falls into one of those buckets. Really think about it.

Those two ideas have driven my decisions on how to blog, what businesses to create, what kind of videos to make, etc… I ask myself those two questions before I do anything.

ScratchBack, in my opinion, does both. But let’s get back to fun. Fun is HIGHLY overrated. Sure, fun may not be practical in the “making money online” world, but you know what? I don’t care, why, because it’s fun!

Sure, I want ScratchBack to be successful, and I chose to position the marketing of it as “fun” as opposed to “getting rich” because I truly believe that there is only so far you can go down the long-tail by pushing “get rich” stuff.

I have this argument all the time. In the grand scheme of things, the “making money online” community is about .00000001111% of bloggers/publishers. The other 99.9999999999999% of the blogs out there are niche-topic bloggers who just write. They don’t worry about making money online.

That’s why nobody has been able to reach them and get them yet, because all the online ad solutions out there are all pitching them how to get rich.

I think they’ll buy into fun easier.

Forget traffic. Forget “getting rich off of ads”. Forget “making money online”.

Fun is the key to cracking the long-tail.