The joy of selling

Having worked for all my adult life in an extreme niche industry, I find the job of selling extremely difficult. Especially, since industrial selling demands incredible patience. And though we have a long list of customer, I am still not sure what makes an industrial customer tick. I guess pedigree helps. If I have 20 customers, I must be doing something right. So, the 21st is not that difficult. It is getting the first one that is difficult.

Internet gave me the chance of trying my hand at selling. I am not talking of selling as in selling on e-bay or something that I have authored or created. It is what I would call 'selling by impression'. How does it work?

I love reading books. And I write about them. Some of the readers who happen to read my reviews may order the book on Amazon through my lens. And I like to think that my review gave them the final push to order for the book. I, of course, would never know who bought it. But I would know how many bought through my pages.

And I finally did it. I managed to sell the first book through my Squidoo lens. Someone ordered The Go-Giver from The Go-Giver Book Review

Am I thrilled? You bet I am. It is not the money that comes for getting someone to buy the book. I get a few cents. It is the thrill of influencing someone's decision. Someone, somewhere, read my review and decided to buy the book. That gives me joy. Pure joy.

Discovering Internet Through Books

No! I don't mean e-books. I mean the books that deal with some aspect of Internet. I avoided such books for a long time - for some strange reason that I have still not been able to put my finger on.

But before I go on here are a few interesting things ...

a) Have you heard of LAUNCHcast? It is Yahoo's online radio station. You can create your own play list. You can pick and choose. This is also where recording companies test waters.

b) Ok how about this? Machinima. Have you heard about this? You can make movies at your home on this using animation characters. All you need is a script and a set of good voices.

c) I am sure you have heard of Rhapsody. Yes? Congratulations because you are ahead of me. I just read about this.

d) Let's try something more basic. Go to Google. In the search field just type "25 * 30" and hit return. What do you get? Yes it works like a calculator. Ho hum! But wait. Now type "twenty five * 30". Hmmmm... it still works. What about "twenty five multiplied by thirty". Wow! It still gives you an answer. What kind of calculator is this?

The first book on Internet that I read was The Google Story by David Vise. Besides telling a story it had such interesting bits (such as the Google calculator) that I was hooked.

I am now reading LONG TAIL. by Chris Anderson. Equally riveting. But the interesting parts are the information on Internet that otherwise would have escaped me.

The best thing about such information is that you can immediately go to the Net and check it out for yourself.

The paradox: the best way of discovering Internet is through books. All this when Internet is threatening to displace books as a habit.

Note: The picture used here belongs to Ilker. To see more such images see gallery.

My Place In The Sun

How would you like to earn $250,000 per week? No this is not a scam. This is happening and we are all contributing. But more of that later down the post.

27-March-2007 is a date I will remember for ever. It was on this date I first published my blog. On that date I became someone who just searches for information on Internet to someone who provides information. That in itself is a huge satisfaction. The blog on DO-178B is niche.

It took me another year or so to decide to start blogging on more general topics and monetize - this blog. As of this moment this blog has been viewed by over 90,000 individuals.

But consider this. There are more than 50 million bloggers world-wide. In India alone there are more than 6000 bloggers. These are conservative estimates. So, my blog is one among 50 million? What are the chances of getting any readers? Where is my place in the sun?

And then Chris Anderson comes to rescue. It turns out that I am part of a LONG TAIL.

So what is a long tail? For example, if you plot the graph between number of visitors (in Y-axis) against all the blogs in the X-axis. Now arrange the blogs on X-Axis from those getting maximum hits to those getting minimum. You would get a rapidly declining curve with the first few blogs getting huge number of visitors. The curve rapidly declines but the value never touches zero on the X-axis. The curve goes on and on.

Let me take a better example ... an example that I am familiar with. My blog has non-zero visits. Everyday there is at least one visitor. The visitor may or may not check out any advertisements. But in a month there is at least one click on the advertisement. That amounts to a few cents. Now it seems 98% of the more-than-50-million-bloggers fall in my category (more of less). So that is 50 million cents a week. And even if we take 50% of these blogs to be inactive, it is $250,000 per week. Not bad earning for someone like Google whose advertisements adorn most of these blogs.

Google, e-bay, Amazon, i-Tunes have all understood this new economy. And are exploiting it.

The ancient Indians too understood this. There is a proverb: "drops fill up oceans." (translated from Hindi)

So, even if I am a tiny cog, I am contributing to the Internet economy. Not bad for a five month old blog.