WPenner's Blog

An important theme on Twitter and other social media platforms is that many people are trying to make money online. What they miss is that in a digital world, “income” doesn’t only mean money. In fact, money is the last income worth considering. Aim instead for three other kinds of income that ultimately drive revenue and meaning.

Reach

Some companies are putting twenty investors on their cap tables, and they all share one quality: reach. – Patrick Stanley

Mr. Stanley, quoted above, argues that reach is a kind of capital in a digital world.

Most companies track reach from multiple perspectives, such as
the number of subscribers, the number of countries their audience lives in, the number of languages the audience speaks, and the number of customer segments they talk to.

Big marketing outfits working for big companies with millions of customers loudly portray reach as a “vanity metric”. Savvy VCs know differently.

A person with a million followers can benefit a new company as much as an investor with a million dollars by spreading the company’s name, reputation and products to a wide customer base. Such a promotion can kick-start an early company’s success. In other words, reach is a kind of capital. Power, and ultimately capital, accrue to those building and leveraging extensive networks – changing what it means to be an investor¹.

Imagine a completely fictional company with zero reach — nobody reads their posts or knows that their products and services exist.

What kind of reputation would they have? None, of course.

What sort of relationships could be developed with no reach? Naturally, none

What revenue could be generated if nobody ever hears their message? Exactly! None.

Reputation

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. — Henry Ford

There is a fundamental and widespread misunderstanding about reputation. Because reputation is what other people think, the impression is that it out of our control. The exact opposite is true: reputation is the type of income most in our control! Reputation in the digital world consists of only two elements: consistency and quality — demonstrating this is easy.

Go to a new blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or other digital space. With virtually no information, you immediately create an impression of the reputation of the site.

How did you do it? You almost certainly looked at how recent the last entry was and how far apart it came from the one(s) before. In other words, you checked how consistent the creator was. This probably took so little time, you may not have noticed yourself doing it.

Then you looked at whether the pictures looked good, the fonts were appropriate, the colours inviting, words were spelled correctly, and so on. You looked at the quality. Again, the impressions collected to reach this conclusion happened instantly, probably under the threshold of consciousness.

And that is reputation in a nutshell: consistency and quality. Both qualities are completely within the creator’s control. Improvements in either will cause immediate improvements in reputation. For what it is worth, real world reputation is not so different and many people would dramatically improve their lives by showing up consistently and with quality.

If you find that people avoid rather than engage with your offerings, start building reputation simply and slowly. The top priority is building consistency into what you are already doing. Then, gradually, escalate quality, as long as you can maintain consistency.

Once reach and reputation are growing, the foundation is laid to build relationships.

Relationships

Everything you want is currently owned or controlled by other people — Brian Tracey

Digital relationships happen both on and off the digital product. The types of relationships to think about include visitors, customers, suppliers and vendors, partners and affiliates. The primary goal of a digital project should be to build as many high-quality relationships as possible. Always try to move relationships from outsider to insider.

Let’s define tactical victory as “getting what you want” and strategic victory as “expanding options”. Relationships are important because they are strategic, in the sense that relationships expand options unlike any other income.

I recently worked with two founders with a scholarly YouTube channel. Working together to explore the opportunities they wanted beyond the site, we discovered opportunities to interview interesting people in their field, do PhD programs with interesting supervisors, work in interesting jobs.

These opportunities represent an “income” worth far more than selling a few bobbles. Developing the reach and reputation to put the ladies at the front of the line for these opportunities was also far more exciting than the money that initially attracted them to the work.

Revenue

Your network is your net worth — Porter Gale

While revenue is what everyone focuses on, it is the last element in the puzzle. Focus instead on growing the first elements of reach, reputation and relationships. These produce distribution and opportunities, which naturally lead to revenue.

This goal-oriented language probably reminds you of the difference between telic and atelic actions, though. Telic activities are those that have a goal or endpoint while atelic are not goal oriented. Telic activities provide many of the dopamine hits that productive people crave.

Ultimately, though, telic activities provide only momentary satisfaction, since upon achieving the goal, new goals immediately spring up. A possible antidote to the low-level dissatisfaction with life experienced by many people is a shift to atelic activities with no end goal state. Even better is to shift telic activities to an atelic focus, such as working on a project as a way of hanging out with friends.²

So one-time revenue is a short-term game that is just barely worth playing because it is a telic goal. Digital income is more strategic than just money. It’s about creating opportunities like new reach, new relationships, new collaborations, and new projects, products, services or ventures.

Reach, then, is the road of digital income, and reputation is the gas. Relationships are the engine. But revenue is not the destination so much as mile-markers along the path.