If you’re starting a business, it’s important to be ruthless about doing the best job possible. If you don’t, you’re highly likely to get overtaken and outcompeted. The world has become globalized, and there are a lot of honest, hardworking people who are looking to eat your lunch. This is especially true if they’re from poorer countries, where wages are low, and the upsides of Wi-Fi money and innovation are massive. An easy way to do the best job possible is to maintain a high standard of quality and professionalism with regards to your brand. This applies whether you’re running a brick and mortar or web-based business, but I’ll talk about web-based businesses in this article, because that’s what I know better.
Traffic pays, but reputation pays more
If you’ve done your research you know that YouTubers get paid about $1-10 per thousand views. Under this regime, they get paid every time somebody watches, guaranteed. But they don’t get paid a lot. To make $1,000 per month, a YouTuber would need to get between 100 thousand and 1 million views. This is a lot easier said than done. What if a YouTuber could make 1% of people watching spend $10 on a digital product? Suddenly, you’re making $1,000 per month with only 10,000 views (or less if you’re running both ads and your digital offer. This is why the actual nature of your content matters. If you can communicate properly, you’ll get better results from your hard work.
A lot of products are scammy
I wanted to affiliate market, but I quickly found that a lot of the programs with best commission rates were complete scams. They were things I simply didn’t want to be promoting, and I realized that people would have less respect for Rising Current if I promoted them. This is true for almost every website. While scammy sponsorships might be appealing in the short run, I would avoid them. You want to create long term success that you can rely on. Promote real stuff and create great products.
The internet is unreasonable
Think about the type of person that gets so excited by a post, video, or article that they feel a need to leave a comment or make a purchase. They’re probably pretty passionate about the content they’ve consumed. Now imagine that that same person hates you enough to try and cause problems for you online. That means they’re pretty passionate, and hateful. If you have enough of these types of people targeting you, things can get pretty unreasonable, pretty fast. If you cheapen your brand badly enough, you won’t only lose money, but you’ll also suffer. Cyberbullying sucks. Nowadays, pretty much every business has an internet or social media facing component. Tread carefully.
The internet forgets, but smaller audiences are more susceptible
This is why you should focus on content creation for as long as you possibly can, provided it’s actually getting you somewhere. If you have a small audience and they get mad, you’re likely to go from being able to survive on the content you create, to being poor. The internet forgets, but losing your audience early on can be a disaster. Try not to do anything to annoy them when you’re just getting started.
Maintain your content formula and do your best
When I say don’t cheapen your brand, I don’t mean you have to go all out on production quality and waste time and money being a perfectionist. Not cheapening your brand refers to being the best creator you can be, while still producing enough content to draw the audience required to sell your product. If you can do that while peddling a product that isn’t a scam, you’re going to be ahead of 99% of content creators.
What happens to cheap brands?
They get ridiculed and slowly die unless they’re highly addictive. Even then, your customer’s gone once they find something better. Cheap brands are often ridiculed and hated unless they offer good deals. So if cheap to you means affordable, go ahead. But don’t try to get by offering a low-quality product. Low-quality products go out of style.
If you’re starting a business, especially a content business, maintain a certain level of quality. It’s hard and painful in the short run. Trust me, I know. But over the long term, you’ll be happy you did. Maintaining quality will bring you more traffic and make you more likeable than you otherwise would have been. You’ll have less trouble selling over the long term, because you’ll be known as someone who does the right thing. So, if you’re selling a service, do a good job. If you’re creating a product, make sure you work hard at developing it. If you’re building a website or content platform, don’t jump into shady ads or scammy affiliate programs. It’s easy to do the right thing, provided you think long-term, and use your moral reasoning. Try to add value to society with your content. Whether it’s by entertaining people for a long time, teaching them something important, or helping a product get sold, do your best to actually help the economy grow. I chose to write about impactful topics because I realized a lot of people were having trouble planning their lives. I figured if I could add anything at all while also getting paid for my efforts it would be a big win. It’s been a long slog, but so far so good. I’m extremely happy with the progress I’ve made, despite being far less wealthy than scammers and those who employ “churn and burn” business models. I personally suggest doing the right thing for the sake of your brand.
Thanks for paying attention.
