Unintended Consequences
Sunday, December 21st, 2008I have been asked by several people in the past about doing some consulting work and have always refused. Mostly because I don’t think my insight is worth the hourly rate I would charge to do the consulting. But someone I had corresponded with via email and met at a conference asked very nicely and was persistent enough without nagging that I scheduled a call with him a few weeks back.
We logged into his account and as I saw areas for improvement I pointed them out, looking through and sharing some of the high level strategies we use for testing and landing pages etc. was a fascinating process because I realized that I had to quantify and justify to myself why the way we do things might be better before I would share it with him.
I know I did not share anything proprietary, but rather things like the best way to setup an ad copy test, or landing page test or how to best setup adgroups etc.
Anyway, the interesting thing about this 30 minutes session was that it really got my creative juices flowing. We are in totally different verticals and I was doing nothing other than commenting on ways to improve his account, but I walked away with 2 ideas that I have put into production for both my personal and corporate accounts, one of which is very lucrative ($1500 per day) - the other is much more promising but I am having some bandwidth issues getting it implemented.
Just a note, I did not steal any ideas, the ideas were my own and not in his account in any way.
The interesting thing for me, was that I believe he found good value in our conversation, and as an unintended consequence I walked away with this creative energy that brought me some very lucrative results.
I guess the morale of the story is that teaching other people what is seemingly obvious to you can make you take a fresh perspective on things and find new opportunities. As an “ideas guy” finding new sources of inspiration is always a welcome thing. I dont think if I consulted for free or on a regular basis that this would work, but I am going to give it a shot every month or so and see if this was a one-off type of event or if it persists.
Idea generation is hugely important in affiliate marketing, “me too” type strategies almost always fail. Take your girlfriend or best friend or mother and sit them down and try and explain to them what you are doing. See the kind of questions they ask, dont dismiss the question, but rather really try and answer them, perhaps you will learn something by teaching someone else like I did.
As a test, because I love to test my theories, I would love to hear your results (good or bad) for those that give it an honest try - maybe this does not work for everyone - maybe it does…