Those Who Can’t, Sell Tutorials on How You Can
I have a vision for what I want DaedTech (and myself) never to be. I never want to have the “I made it, and so can you by following these [N] easy steps!” vibe, in any way. If you ever catch me doing that, please gather with your pitchforks and storm my gate.
Here’s the thing. Success is hard, specific, and custom to your own context. But a lot of people don’t let that stop them from hawking it in $99 info products.
Fake It ’til You Make It… as an Expert?
I’m about to describe what I think of as an anti-pattern in the knowledge economy. You’ve probably experienced this at least subconsciously, if you haven’t yet learned to actively recognize it.
This crystallized in my head recently when I signed up for something called “The Dynamite Circle” (it’s a community for established digital nomad-leaning entrepreneurs). I was poking around and noticed this blog post, with a couple of great turns of phrase.
In describing a pre-quit-your-job, would-be lifestyle designer, they said:
You are buying products from blogs that make a little money on how to make a little money with your blog.
That produced almost a spit take from me, because I can picture this exact thing. And so, probably, can you. It has:
- An oversize photo of the site proprietor smiling maniacally
- Some polished-but-somehow-budget graphics
- The typical “hero journey” landing page layout
- And assurances that you, too, can make money through affiliate marketing, quit your job, and earn passively on a beach in Bali.
But, if you dig into any of the public metrics around the site, you see that it’s getting very little traffic. What you’ve really got here is someone writing blog posts from a cubicle on their lunch break about how you can follow their lead to a beach in Bali.