It’s time again for a new website. I wanted to share with you what I’m doing in case it works.
Not everything works.
Online work takes lots of experimentation. If you’re the kind of person who wants every minute of your labor to produce guaranteed paychecks, you need to get a job at the local factory. Entrepreneurs play around the edges and sometimes we find something that should work, ought to work, might work … but you don’t know till you try it.
There was a great adage about Hollywood where one famous screenwriter or director say, “Nobody knows anything.” He was talking about Hollywood bigshots who, despite their experience and expertise, really can’t predict what audiences will go for. If they could, the big studios would produce one blockbuster after another. Well, the same is true of online work. You can do some preliminary research, you can look at other people’s successes and failures (and your own), and you can gather data, but at the end of the day, nobody knows anything. You try something.
I’m trying to build a mailing list for perfume. Building a mailing list is no small feat. Most people do not like to hand over an email address without some incentive. The idea is to incentivize them to the point that you can get an email address and have a potential list. If the list is large, you may be able to create a product for them. If the list is small, even if you create a product, you just don’t have many buyers.
A list, in many ways, is a barometer. Is this project feasible? Will it work? My attempt to build a list is at http://www.theperfume-reporter.com. Check it out. You can even sign up, if you want, and you can see what I’m doing over there.
Right now, to be honest, it’s been pretty slow. I don’t know if there are no perfume buyers in the downturned economy or if this is just not as lively a group of people as I thought. I’m going to give it a few more weeks. But I’ll tell you honestly, my list count is under 100 persons and that’s pretty bad.
