Market Like a Dandelion
I’m a huge Cory Dotorow
So, when I read this, I immediately thought of the affiliate community and the lessons we could learn by thinking of our content production in terms of dandelions instead of our typical mammalian (reproduction and production are very costly and should be protected) point of view…
Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Think Like a Dandelion: I know this for a fact. I review a lot of books on Boing Boing, and whenever I do, I link to the Amazon page for the book, using my ‘affiliate ID’ in the URL. If you follow one of those links and buy the book, I get a commission — about eight percent. I can use Amazon’s reporting tool to tell exactly how many people click on my links, and how many of them shell out money for the book, and here’s the thing: when I link to a book that’s out soon, available now for pre-order, I reliably get less than ten percent of the purchases I get when I link to books that are available for sale now. Nine out of ten Boing Boing readers who buy books based on my reviews don’t want to pre-order a title and wait for it to show up later.
The net is an unending NOW of moments and distractions and wonderments and puzzlements and rages. Asking someone riding its currents to undertake some kind of complex dance before she can hand you her money is a losing proposition. User-interface designers speak of how every additional click between thought and deed lops a huge number of seeds out of the running for germination.
Head over to the link above and read the whole piece. It’s short and good, but worth your time to think on how you can improve your own marketing efforts by taking the dandelion approach.