Offering Client Trials: Prototypes vs Auditions

(Editorial note: I originally published this one over on the Hit Subscribe blog.)

Do you offer a trial?

I’ve run Hit Subscribe’s sales for five of our seven years of existence.  And this is by far the most common question I field at some point during discovery.

The simple answer to the question is “sure, we can do that.”

We don’t bother to set any minimums on the amount of content you can commission.  We’re not selling automobiles; economies of scale on content are marginal.  You can buy as little as a single blog post if that meets your needs.

In fact, if you read our client bill of rights, you’ll see that we encourage you to de-risk.  If you’re worried about doing something at scale, I view it as our obligation as a vendor to help you prototype success ahead of a large-scale commitment.

Where things get nuanced, however, is around the question of which risk you’re minimizing for when you ask about a trial.  And that’s at the core of what I want to document here reference for future prospects.  We’re happy to start small, but there’s a good chance we don’t think of a trial the same way you do.

Auditions vs Prototypes: What Risk Does Each Reduce?

To get specific about this, we view small batches as prototypes, and, importantly, not auditions.  Consider the difference.

Auditions and Prototypes

• An audition is a subjective evaluation that de-risks against the judge having a large commitment to something they don’t care for.
• A prototype is an objective evaluation that de-risks against an engagement not achieving a goal or outcome.

A simple, if mundane, example of an audition is a wine tasting.  Before purchasing an expensive bottle of wine from a winery, it makes sense to run a trial (audition) of “do I, the judge of wine, like this wine?”

In a professional context, auditions tend to, or at least should, move beyond simple aesthetics.  The judge of a piece of content (ideally) isn’t evaluating whether they personally like it but rather acting as a proxy for others’ opinions or perhaps as some kind of designated expert in the medium.  But the subjective, “do I approve of this” evaluation remains at the core.

A prototype, on the other hand, involves a measurable big-picture goal and a smaller experiment designed to provide fast feedback on an initiative’s ability to achieve that goal.

For instance, let’s go back to the winery.  But this time, let’s say you have a goal to fill your small wine cellar with 200 bottles of wine, for less than $5,000, with wine that you feel good about serving to guests.  Here your tasting becomes less important in favor of concerns like whether the bottles are in an acceptable price range, will fit in the cellar’s slots, and will appeal to unknown people.

In this world, a prototype might involve buying five bottles of wine within your budget, then confirming they fit in the cellar and guests seem to like them.  If the run of five goes well, you can scale up your buying from the winery.

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Link Building for Non-Scumbags: Build Authority Without Being Awful

(Editorial note: I originally published this on Hit Subscribe, and am going to gradually 301 the rest of the SEO/digital marketing content over there, where it makes more editorial sense.  But I’ll keep cross-posting it here, if it seems like might be relevant to this audience.  I’ll also keep posting miscellaneous rants and thoughts for indies and techies here.)

If the title here seems aggressive, my hope is that you’ll empathize with me by the time you’re done reading.

Throughout this post, I’m going to post screenshots of link building outreach I’ve received over the years.  They’re not going to be relevant to the flow of the post, per se.  Instead, I’m going to invite you on a walk with me through a digital garden of spam while I explain how to earn yourself backlinks without being terrible or hiring someone else to be terrible on your behalf.

You see, these screenshots represent how most link building outfits operate.  And they’re just the tip of the iceberg of what I receive—just the ones funny enough to save.

Link Building: What It Is, Briefly

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say link building, let’s start simply.  What is link building?

Well, for SEO purposes, the more links you have from other sites to yours, the more search engines like your site, and they’ll rank your content accordingly.  So link building is an activity wherein you specifically “encourage” the world to link to your site, through a variety of tactics.  These tactics run the gamut from “create interesting content that people want to link” to “hack into some poor blogger’s WordPress instance and insert 40 million links before someone kicks you out and has you arrested.”

The Link Building State of the Art

Sadly, the state of the art in link building looks a lot more like the latter than the former.

Aw, you don’t have to visit if you don’t want to, Tony Montana, but if you do, please say hello to my little friend.

If you go out and google link building, I’m sure you’ll hear from the world’s top SEO tool vendors.  And I’m also sure that—caveated with appropriate cautions not to leverage underhanded, “black hat SEO” tactics and that the best approach is earning links via “good” content—they’ll encourage you to undertake an extremely outreach- (read: spam-) heavy approach, such as:

1. Create a throwaway gmail address because boy are people going to report what you’re doing as spam.
2. Create an email template wherein you beg for links or else mendaciously tell recipients that it’s in their best interest to link to you.
3. Unleash that email template onto the blogosphere, like a firehose taking out a few butterflies on some flowers.
4. If that doesn’t work, just try to bribe people.
5. In parallel to all of that, offer filler content with links to your site as a guest post for other sites.
6. If that doesn’t work, try to sneak content with links onto various sites.
7. As a last resort, also bribe them to publish the filler content.

As you might imagine, these tactics yield a low success rate.  And that means the only way to make them succeed is to execute them at incredibly high volume and low cost.

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