Fun Is The Key To Marketing To The Long-Tail

20 November 2007 Written By: Jim KukralComments: Comments

Make money teaching a class at Prfessor.com

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.

Jim Recommends...

The Shoemoney System - Check it out here.


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  • I know that you are not trying to market it as a money making service and are looking to promote it as a tipping service etc. It's never going to the main source of income for any big blog however I do think it will be provide a little extra cash for bloggers.

    Regarding lower traffic blogs, I think that scratchback could make more money on some blogs than adsense. And with payperpost dying a death, the options for lower traffic bloggers are slowly disappearing.
  • Indeed Kevin, thanks for commenting.
  • good point Kevin,

    With ppp on the google attack. Its pushing for bloggers to actually add value, then just selling off the seo link value.

    So with scratchback, its a basic model to say, hey am I worth a buck?

    Jim has spoken about this model at affiliate summits in the past. Fo how bloggers were working the tip jar. To well beg... I mean ask for.... a virtual starbucks coffee or beer donation?

    Jim keep on making things on the web fun. It's how we stumbled into a business model from doing funny product, comedy reviews on the web since 96'.

    But now we just branded it as a service called "linkbait". So that we could stay with the latest hot web 2.0 marketing words.
  • Fun is good. Who doesn't like fun? It makes things less of a chore and even helps people understand concepts better. I applaud you for creating something for fun. Whether people take it seriously or not is really not important. At least, they're having fun. all things seem to fall into place when we leave things to just work out on their own.
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