How easy do you think it is to make money on Ebay? Amazon? Or even Udemy? Do you think you can put up some products tomorrow and within a few weeks you will become a gold standard seller?
Look at these titles, all on the top of organic google searches:
They all make it sound so easy. They prey on the fact the human nature wants us to be doing better and shows us that there is this glimmer of hope. It’s so doable. Many of the people behind the success stories are normal people, just like you or I. They started with nothing and now look where they are. I can be one of them, just look at how easy they found it.
This is solid marketing. Its designed to give you that fuzzy feeling. The feeling that everything is possible. Marketing is a play on emotions, and these emotions help influence the decisions you make. Do you think Ebay feel everyone that becomes a seller will make a solid living? Of course they don’t. They have the data. They know how long tailed their success rate is for sellers. It probably a longer tailed curve than what we see on STEEM. But it does not stop them using this as a marking tool.
I invite you to check out ebays own website, in particular this article
https://www.ebay.co.uk/gds/History-of-Ebay-/10000000008868464/g.html
Did you see what I saw?
EBay Income Possibilities
Almost half the article is focused on how it is possible, all you have to do is believe. Haha I love this marketing. It’s like Santa to children.
Ebay, Amazon, Udemy, Teacherspayteachers all these sort of sites where people can make money online thrive off the fact that some millionaires have been created because they empower people to become self-sufficient.
It’s these success stories that begin the snowball effect. These success stories feed the want from humans to replicate what seems like easy financial success.
Yet Steemit Inc and @ned got blasted for this:
For a while on STEEM we had Jerry Banified. He was our ‘You can do it to’ story with marketing campaigns like the articles shows above. Much to the dissatisfaction of many loyal steem users, Jerry quickly rose in the witness rankings. Yet many people, including me, called him a scam (okay so he has history on the web for making millions every where he goes, but you get what I am saying here right?, people want to believe they too can ‘Do a Jerry’)
Let’s face it, Jerry rise in the witness rankings was not only down to his own steem investment but also the traffic he was brining. The snowball effects.
Do you think Steemit Inc wanted to create a blockchain where everyone could gain financial wealth? If you think that you are daft. It’s as clear as day. Their words…….
The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people overestimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward
STEEM needs success stories to sell and Steemit inc know this. Why do you think they have allowed a system to continue where only bot boosted posts get to trending? We don’t have Jerry any more but we do have a pretrial from trending that, what people are seeking, this illusive easy financial success, is very possible. Trending provides this. Like it or not.
However, facts are, bidbots are not really providing these success stories. There are 4 bots netting over 10% of the rewards pool every month in bid earnings and curation rewards. And the people behind the posts boosted have no success story to really tell because they made no money. Bidbots are not about content. No matter how subjective ‘good content’ is bidbots can’t tell STEEMs success story because steem is about content, or is it about bots?
We need more success stories. And not just one or two. We need 50-60-70-80-90 even 100 success stories for each App created on the block. And we need to let these financially successful people gloat and sing their stories on the top of their voices from the highest tree. Some people that follow them will also be successful, however most wont.
I can already hear some of you say “But Paula what about retention, you have said yourself the expectation gap is one cause of poor retention?” and yes, this is very true. But facts are, we are still so small right now, and I know when Udemy was so small, their concerns were not based on retaining every new instructor, but finding the next success story they could use to attract more.
I’m not talking just about creators here. STEEM also need success stories for curators. Imagine the floods of new users when people are shouting from trees “hay look at me and I did this by curating” There are more content consumers in this world than creators. How are we missing this link so much?
There has been much talk about a proposal to change the payouts from 75%/25% to 50%/50%. Simple fact, right now we have a problem getting people to curate manually. Anything that improves this is good for creators, good for the platform and good for starting to create those curator success stories.
We want to create a demand for STEEM, a demand for the use of the Apps being created on the block. Like it or not, this proven marketing strategy works time and time again.
This post comes with Steemfest starting in just a few days. You may even be reading this while you are on your way. I so wish I was going, but with two young kids is not possible for me to actually get away. Marketing is a hot topic right now and many people are calling for Steemit Inc to make it happen and I would love to be part of the discussion.
My call on this is not to Steemit Inc or to @ned, but to all the developers creating apps. Many of which have been given a nice little kickstarter funding from Steemit Inc.. What are you going to do to market your app? How are you going to fund the marketing? Maybe you would all consider creating a shared marketing budget, funded with upvotes from your kickstarter funding. After all, funding the start of a project includes marketing.
Have a great time at steemfest, talk loads, drink load and come up with solutions.
Shamless Plug
Like what we are doing? Dont forget to vote for @steemcommunity as your steem witness.
