ContentDJ Blog

One of the craziest shit inexperienced entrepreneurs say when you ask them the question “What’s your business model?” is we are focusing on growing our user base right now. Ever wonder at what point they start answering that question properly, and what it takes to get there?

A recent leaked FourSquare pitch deck reveals just that. Here it is…

This sounds like some boring Ad Tech and privacy-invasive shit! What happen to the exciting consumer facing app of yours, FourSquare?

Two Ways to Monetize a Website

There are basically two ways to monetize a website – direct monetization or indirect monetization.

Here are a few ways you can monetize your visitors directly. I am naming a few categories with two examples for each.

• Info products (Udemy, CreativeLive)
• E-commerce (Amazon, Etsy etc)
• Subscriptions (World of Warcraft, Salesforce)
• Virtual items (Zynga, Facebook virtual items)
• Transaction based companies (Stripe, Paypal)
• Marketplaces (AirBnB, eBay)

Here are a few ways to monetize your visitors indirectly:

• Content and news sites (eHow, Mashable, NYT)
• User generated content site (Youtube, Reddit)
• Social networks or consumer facing site (Facebook, FourSquare)

Basically, if you take the indirect monetization path, you have to think of yourself as a publisher. You are monetizing eyeballs and sell these eyeballs to your advertisers. Like the newspaper, radio and tv shows before, you need to beg your advertisers to pay for the bills.

Monetizing a Consumer Site

This is not something a product visionary or a startup founder can pull off. If your consumer facing app gets lucky and you get to this stage, you need to hire enterprise sales staff. They need to run happy hours for advertising departments – buying candies for the people working on Madison Avenue. You need to do some hardcore privacy-intrusive shit and betray the users you try so hard to get earlier – sell them as farm animals to the advertisers. You need to sell your souls and beg for redemptions later.

So, as Andrew Chen puts it succinctly your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise. But to qualify, you need to be lucky, as the prerequisites are raising and burning through millions of dollars.

The End of Consumer Startup Era

As Facebook continues to struggle in the stock market, it seems that we have arrived at the end of consumer startup era.

A recent Business Insider article outlined this trend:

“The interesting innovation now is happening in [business-to-business] and infrastructure, which doesn’t seem as intellectually interesting but can have a large impact,” an investor told us. “[Business-to-consumer] might just be tapped out for the moment after a good 5+ year run.”

Suddenly the most interesting startups are in less-sexy sectors: hardware, enterprise software, infrastructure—even biotech.

I would argue that these startups have clearly defined value proposition – like a traditional brick and mortar business. This is actually how a normal business operates. You have something valuable you charge for it, as outlined by one of my favorite Startup School talks by DHH.

Still think enterprise software is boring? Still think it’s fun to work on a consumer facing site? You might want to think again…

It’s 1995. The web is in its infancy. In San Diego, a small web development agency discovered a painful problem faced by one of its clients – it took 24 hours to process a single day’s worth of website tracking results. The team decided to run the same data against its internal tools. The result was promising. It took merely 15 minutes. It’s then that the team had discovered a “lightbulb moment”. The team decided to pivot to form a company called Urchin. Years later, Urchin was acquired by Google and rebranded as Google Analytics. And the rest is history.

The Power of Real Time Marketing

The marketing world has matured considerably since the early days of the web. Now, marketers are able to gather real time insights with ever more sophisticated marketing software. Marketing has moved into the real time world.

Now, with the advent of social media, when a potential lead posts a question on Twitter, a marketer can answer the question within seconds. This has turned marketing from a one-way broadcast into a two-way communication channel. In the next few years, as we move further into the age of big data, you can expect to see more sophisticated real time marketing at work.

However, unless we automate everything – replacing all telemarketers with robots; replacing all social media conversations with automated messages… Until we completely remove the human touch from our marketing (a very scary world indeed), technology is only as good as the people using it. So, with all these sophisticated marketing software, as a less sophisticated entrepreneur, how do you stay motivated at social media marketing in order to compete with the big guys? More importantly, how do you get better as a social media marketer?

The Social Media Feedback Loop

Andrew Chen is one of my favorite startup bloggers. He recently wrote about the writer feedback loop and how it is missing in RSS readers. Here is what he had to say:

“Feedback loops let you iterate on what kinds of content resonate with your audience. Writers need feedback loops to improve their writing”

Beside helping writers improve, a feedback loop is also critical from a motivational standpoint. Have you ever got onto Facebook to do something only to be distracted with all the notifications? Have you ever wondered how Facebook got us hooked and made us check it throughout the day? This is what a working feedback loop looks like.

When you publish something on Facebook, you see friends react instantly. This creates a positive feedback loop and resulting in you sharing more things. It works because our brain experiences Dopamine rush. This plunge of pleasure is well known in the psychology world.

So, wouldn’t it be great if you could get this plunge of pleasure to work for you on your job? How do you get addicted to social media marketing? More importantly, how do you get better at generating engagement and acquiring leads on social media?

The answer is the social media feedback loop.

The Social Media Rockstar

Let’s imagine you are a DJ playing music in a club. You switch on one song, and immediately you see the audience’s reaction. This is powerful! It means the more you work as a DJ, the better you are at curating the kind of songs your audience loves. You are working on improving your hunches to make you a better DJ.

Business is about creating a community around a product or service. All successful businesses requires a community to thrive. On the social media and content marketing front, the goal is to create this kind of engagement that a DJ sees immediately, so we can improve our hunches and become better social media marketers. Surprisingly, with abundance of social media software out there, it’s still difficult to close this social media feedback loop.

Track Social Media Engagements in Real Time with ContentDJ

Today we are making the content curation one step closer to closing the social media feedback loop. We are creating the authentic ContentDJ experience.

Now, as you publish content on social media, you can gather engagement in real time. You will see clicks, favorites and follows as you publish content. And this is how you can become a social media rockstar. Give it a try now!

Top 5 Popular Education Hashtags

1. #education
2. #edchat
3. #edtech
4. #college
5. #highered

Over the years, I’ve met a lot of educators on Twitter. To facilitate educational content discovery, here is an infographic showing you the top education hashtags. Enjoy!