I started my own business at a late age — by the time I
made Zen Habits into a business in 2007, I was in my
mid-30s and had toiled through various jobs for 17 years.
So, when I started out, I didn’t know what I was doing (and
still don’t, but less so now). I tried everything to make
money, to make my site more popular (which I thought
was important). Some of it worked, some didn’t. Some
made me feel bad about myself. Some things readers
reacted badly to, and others they loved.
Through this trial and error, I learned some principles that
work for me. I don’t share them here to show that I’m
superior to anyone, but to show an example of what might
work for you. To show that doing things that feel right can
make a business succeed.
Here’s how I conduct my business.
Readers first. This is my No. 1 rule, and it has served me
extremely well. When I have a question (“should I promote
X or not?”) the answer is always, “What would my readers
want? What would help them most?” When the choice is
between making some extra money or my readers’
interest, the choice is obvious. There is no choice. I can’t
tell you how many times I’ve passed up being part of a
mega-sale or affiliate marketing campaign that would have
earned me $50K (and sometimes much more) in a day or
two if I’d decided to participate. I’ve walked away from at
least $1M because it would have put profits before my
readers. And I think my readers trust me more because of
this (see next item).
Trust is everything. The most valuable assets I have are
my readers’ trust and attention. And the attention will go
really fast if they stop trusting me. Everything else in this
list is based around these first two principles. When you
start doing affiliate marketing, even if you think it would
help the reader, if it would make them question your
motives (is he trying to help me or make some money
here?), it erodes their trust, a little at a time. That’s not
worth the money.
Make money by helping. I put out products and courses
that I think will really help people, and that’s how I make
money. This works really well for me. People are happy
because their lives are better, and I’m happy because the
revenue I make is entirely coming from making people’s
lives better. We both win, our lives are all enriched. This is
not the case from advertising (see next item).
No ads, affiliate marketing. These are both the same,
really. When you market someone else’s product as an
affiliate, it’s just a hidden form of advertising. I should
note that I had ads and did affiliate marketing for a couple
years before giving it up. Why’d I give it up? Well, I realized
(through experimentation) that the return on this kind of
business model is very bad. You get very little revenue,
and erode trust. That’s a bad formula for making money.
When you sell an ad, what you’re really selling is your
readers’ attention and trust — they trust you to put
something important in front of their attention, and you
capitalize on that. Of course, most readers learn not to
trust the ads, and try to skip them, and put up with them
because they want the good content (or service) you’re
giving them. So they no longer trust you as much, but put
up with your revenue tactics. This sucks. Who wants their
customers to put up with anything? Why not delight them
with how you make money? Why not enrich them? Now,
can everyone do this? Possibly not, but I wouldn’t reject
the idea without giving it a genuine shot.
Just the text – no social media buttons, popups,
dropdowns, or anything else that annoys or distracts. This
goes back to trust — people come to my site to read
something that will add value to their lives. Not to be
pushed to share something on social media, or like
something, or subscribe to my email newsletter. Yes, I
have a thing at the bottom to subscribe, but it’s not pushy,
and I don’t promise any gimmicky downloads. When your
site has a popup or dropdown that asks people to
subscribe, it’s annoying. I’m sorry to be blunt but I’m
speaking as a reader now — I will never go back to a site
that does that. Which means I don’t read a lot of my
friends’ sites because they do this. Give the readers what
they want, and nothing else, and you won’t have to ask
them to subscribe or share. They’ll do it on their own, and
this is the kind of share and subscriber you want.
Uncopyright. My site has been uncopryrighted since
January 2008 (there weren’t any other sites doing this at
the time), and in the last 5+ years, uncopyright has not
only not hurt my business, I strongly believe it’s helped
tremendously. Why? Because it helps people share and
spread my work much more easily. If someone wants to
use an article of mine, they don’t have to go through the
hassle of trying to contact me and ask permission — they
just use it. This has caused people to use my work in
books, magazines, blogs, newsletters, classroom
materials, art, conferences and more. This is amazing. In
addition, uncopyright promotes the idea of sharing, and
when you share with people, they tend to trust you more.
Sharing builds trust.
No sales. I’ve seen many people do three-day sales of
their products (or something similar), but I’ve never done
one of these (that I can recall). Why not? Because it
makes no sense to the reader (remember, readers first).
Tell me the reader: why are you lowering the price of your
product for three days? Why only those three days? If you
can lower the price for those days, why not the other
days? Is it to make more money from me (manipulate me
into buying the book)? Is the price too high on the other
days? What if I already bought the book at the higher price
— was I ripped off? These are questions the reader has no
answers to, and no matter how much you try to justify the
reasons of the sale, it doesn’t make sense. Either set the
price at the higher price point (because you think it’s worth
it), or set it at the lower price point (because you want to
get it into the hands of more people).
Admit mistakes. It might sound like I’m pretending to be
perfect at what I do, but the truth is I’m winging it. I’m
making it up as a I go along, in hopes that I won’t screw it
up, and constant fear that I am badly messing up. I have
more trust in this process (and in my readers) now that
I’ve been doing it for seven years and nothing has fallen
apart, but I have made many mistakes along the way. I’ve
been overly promotional, I’ve done affiliate marketing (just
a couple of times), I had advertising, I asked people to
share my work, I asked for votes. Those were mistakes,
but I learned from them and try my best not to repeat
them. Recently, in my Sea Change Program, I removed old
habit modules from 2013 (I felt they were outdated), and
my members were upset. I fixed the mistake and put the
modules back. People don’t expect you to be perfect —
they do expect you to try your best to fix mistakes when
you make them. I admit my mistakes, and try to rectify
them and do better. People trust me more because of it, I
think.
Don’t front. I don’t pretend I’m more than I am. I think
there’s a tendency in the online world to over represent
yourself — put yourself off as an expert or the world’s
leading whatever the hell. But I’m not the world’s leading
anything. I am just a guy who has a wife and six kids, who
has changed his life by making small habit changes, one
at a time. A guy who has simplified his life and focused on
being mindful. I’ve learned a lot from these experiences,
and share them as much as I can here on Zen Habits.
That’s all I am, and I don’t try to be more. When you only
try to be yourself, you can’t fail.
Forget about stats, focus on helping. In the early days, I
was obsessed about site statistics. I would check my stats
counter several times a day, look at where all the traffic
was coming from, try to get my numbers up. Here’s the
thing: you can’t do anything with those stats. If you’re
getting traffic from Reddit or Twitter, you can’t do anything
about that. All you can do, once you’ve seen the stats, is
try to create great content. Try to help people. Try to add
value. That’s what you’d do even if you had zero stats.
The stats don’t change what you should do — though they
might motivate you to do things you shouldn’t do to get
the stats up, things that aren’t trustworthy. The stats just
make you obsessive. About three years ago, I removed all
stats trackers from my site, and now am freed from that
worry. Now I focus on what really matters: helping people
as best I can.
Do what feels right. This is vague and isn’t very helpful at
first, because in the beginning, you’re never really sure
what’s “right”. There are lots of choices to make and it
always seems smart to just do what other people are
doing, what the experts tell you to do. Unfortunately, that’s
often wrong. Everyone else does what everyone else does
because that seems safer, and so they act out of fear of
doing the wrong thing. In fact, safer is not the right thing.
Doing the right thing is going to be against the
mainstream. For example, when I gave up copyright, or let
go of ads or social media buttons or affiliate marketing, or
comments, those were all very scary things for me. It was
against what everyone else at the time was doing. But in
the end, I knew they were the right thing, because it was
what was best for my readers. And it made me feel good
about what I was doing. This is the compass you need to
develop, to build trust with your readers, and with yourself.
Feel good about what you’re doing, don’t act out of fear.
By Leo Babauta. http://zenhabits.net/conduct/
