Recently, while in Austin for South By Southwest, I made up two words. One, a joke, So-By came to mind when speaking to someone about the conference I was quickly corrected, by more experienced attendees, that it is called "South By". Well I figured, as my hero Joe Namath said "If you aren't going all the way, why go at all?". So, in the grand style of real estate markets everywhere I decided it should be called "So-By". Taking out the 'uth' letters saved me an incalculable amount of time.
The other word, that I'm much more proud of is Valuetize. See, in business everyone always wants to know how you are going to monetize something. That is, they are politely asking you how you are going to make money off of something. Common answers these days are advertising, subscription, affiliate referrals, premium services, etc. Which in turn produces the common response "Thats a cool idea but I'm not investing.".
In the more 'creative' atmosphere of So-By people also wanted to know how they could montetize (not that there is anything wrong with that) their blog, web series, podcast, film, etc. and I started to think that most of these projects would not make any money directly.
So, this may all be painfully obvious but I think people should be OK with that, especially these days when the cost of launching a product or website is so low, since there are so many other ways that a project can create value. We still absolutely need to be totally aware of why we are doing something and ask ourselves if it is line with your own personal purpose.
You see, on several different occasions I heard this story. "Joe and I did not know what we were doing when we started projectX. We just knew we loved doing it. After a while our fan/customer base grew. Eventually we met personA at companyB and they hired us to work on projectY."
We all need to pay the rent but I don't think we need to worry about trying to monetize every project in our lives. There are many other ways to valuetize your blog, podcast, web video series, webb application, etc. These include:
- Promoting your own personal brand
- Teaching and helping others
- Establishing relationships within your target community
- Being seen as an expert
- Becoming an expert
and there are probably many more. All of which are valuable in and of themselves and, of course, may lead to paying gigs.
So my question to you is, How are you going to valuetize that?
