Marketing From Your Conscience
March 1st, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
Email this article to a friend
I wrote and posted another new article called “Marketing From Your Conscience.” In this article the concept of marketing is meant both professionally (marketing products and services) and personally (marketing yourself for a job or a relationship). The main point of the article is to show how marketing can be done much more effectively when it’s fully aligned (i.e. congruent) with one’s conscience.
A misalignment between marketing and conscience is one I’ve seen repeatedly in the shareware industry, which is what lead me to write an article on this topic. Many shareware developers invest months of hard work to make a new product and then barely market it at all. I’d have to guess that most first-time shareware developers invest in the range of 20 to 100 hours marketing their first product. The amount of marketing effort I’d advise for a decent shareware product is in the range of 500 to 1000 hours (about 3-6 person-months full-time) as a minimum, and that’s just for the initial launch promotion. 100 hours is really just token marketing that will cover the basics like doing a press release, search engine optimization, submitting to download sites, newsgroup announcements, and a few other standard shareware promotional tasks. This is nothing but a mosquito bite in terms of what it takes to really get the word out. So I wondered why someone would spend 1000 hours to make a product and then only 50 hours to tell people about it, which IMO is too little time to really make a dent and generate sufficient sales unless you happen to get lucky.
With all the zillions of marketing books and free marketing advice you can find online, there’s clearly no shortage of marketing ideas on this planet. Many cost nothing at all to implement. Over the past 5 months, I was able to build this site’s traffic from nothing to its current level of 4000 visits per day without spending a dime on marketing. (In fact, the total amount of money I’ve spent on this site so far has been $9 just to register the domain; I’m not even paying for hosting or bandwidth). So a lack of knowledge or a lack of money is no excuse for a lack of marketing because if you know you lack knowledge, then all you’ve got to do is get a book and start reading. This is the information age. “I don’t know how” just isn’t a valid excuse anymore. Learn how. There are people who spend their whole careers doing marketing work, and they don’t seem to run out of things to do, but somehow many shareware developers feel they’ve done all they can after a mere 50 hours.
Eventually I figured out that when people said, “I don’t know how to do marketing,” what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to market this product because deep down I know people would be better off not buying it. It’s a product that didn’t really need to be created. I made a mistake in developing it in the first place. So the more I market it, the guiltier I feel, and the more good time I throw after bad. But I’m not ready to admit that to myself just yet, so I’m going to do some shallow token marketing and then spend the rest of my time complaining about low sales while developing product #2. I’ll have a lot of trouble finishing #2 though because I know when I finish it, I’ll have to market it too, and I don’t really think this product will be one people should buy either. I don’t see a way out of this though, so I’ll just tell myself and others I’m not good at marketing, even though I could get good at it if I wanted to. And for good measure, perhaps I’ll throw a pity party to whine about the whole industry being broken as well (even though I know there are others thriving under current conditions). Just don’t force me to admit that I wasted so much time creating a product no one really needs.”
Enjoy the article. 
March 1st, 2005 at 6:50 am
Gee, Steve, why don’t you tell us how you really feel. B-)
March 1st, 2005 at 7:49 am
Steve,
As somebody that helps market a product, I know exactly where you are coming from. I started marketing our first products last June and I was just amazed at how much time it really took to do a good job. I am reading marketing/sales books constantly looking for new ideas to try.
Many developers shun marketing because they don’t like it. They just think that a good product should sell itself. They think if they just add a couple more features, then the product will gain sales momentum. They would be better off spending more time marketing and less time adding new features.
March 1st, 2005 at 8:09 am
> With all the zillions of marketing books
> and free marketing advice you can find
> online, there’s clearly no shortage of
> marketing ideas on this planet.
This is in fact a serious problem. Yes, there are lots and lots of ideas. A small percentage of these ideas work.
So what’s needed is not a lot of ideas, but to be able to find the ideas that work.
> Many cost nothing at all to implement.
… except your time, which is very valuable. Spend it on a marketing idea that works, and you’ll have a business. Spend it on all the marketing ideas you can find, and you’ll probably have a lot profit because most of the ideas won’t work.
This is why at my company we have 3 lists of ideas:
A. ideas we haven’t tried
B. ideas we have tried, and work
C. ideas we have tried, but don’t work
Some marketing ideas work or not depending on the season. You can do promotion X in the summer and get very little sales from it, or you can do it in the autumn and have a large boost of sales.
Important public events can also affect how your marketing is received by the public.
I don’t know if in your business you kept the A, B and C lists described above, but if you did, I would be very interested in your B and C lists.
March 1st, 2005 at 8:19 am
Some time ago I have developed a software program and released it as shareware. At the time for me it was just a game. I released it with the same mindset with which people release open source (except I don’t believe in open source, and this is why I released it as shareware).
The software started selling. I have developed a second version, but I had some serious doubts. To me the utility seemed worthless. I was thinking “What the hell am I doing? I’m selling a worthless utility! In fact it’s not a good program”.
Then some user feedback came, and I had the idea of asking users why they have bought my utility, what value it offered them, how can I improve it, etc.
The responses surprised me and made me see that the program was indeed valuable. It was just a toy to me, because I had lots of knowledge about how the computer works, but it was very useful and valuable to my users. So my doubts vanished, and I started work on version 3.
March 1st, 2005 at 9:39 am
“Marketing From Consience” has truly gotten me to step back and evaluate what I am trying to accomplish with my application.
Thanks Steve. Which of Jay Abraham’s books should I start with?
March 1st, 2005 at 9:46 am
Hi Steve,
What I always do with your articles (from here, from dexterity.com) is copy them to MS Word and then print. Would you please be so nice to add “Print this page” or something like this to the website, so that we can print articles directly from browser?
Thanks!
-Dmitry Chestnykh
March 1st, 2005 at 1:26 pm
@ Jim: Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
@ Dmitry: Thanks… this one’s already on my to do list for the site.
March 1st, 2005 at 1:31 pm
I like the idea of conscience… however for those of us with null marketing abilities (not necessarily in shareware business) you could write an article with a few pointers
Best regards from Chile
March 1st, 2005 at 1:40 pm
MX: I’m confused. Shareware is a marketing method. It is not clear when you said that you released your software as shareware as opposed to open source. In fact, there are people who release open source products and release it as shareware to market it. I myself am interested in doing so by making games that have proprietary data and Free/Open source code.
March 2nd, 2005 at 1:12 am
Marketing yourself
If you have ever felt guilty asking for money for your services, even when you knew you were providing excellent value, then you need to read Steve Pavlina’s Marketing from your conscience. [Link via Steve's weblog]
And this doesn’t just apply to…
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:11 am
I myself have felt guilty about charging for services. Whether my services were really worth it or not or I just have a poor perception of myself, Marketing From Your Consience has at least taught me to take a step back and take an objective look at my services.
If I am providing a good service why should I feel ashamed?
March 2nd, 2005 at 3:33 pm
very interesting entry, and very true (even though sometimes the truth hurts
)
BTW Steve, have you read ‘Blink’ the new book by the ‘Tipping point’ guy? I reckon you’d love it.
March 2nd, 2005 at 6:40 pm
I’ve read The Tipping Point… haven’t read Blink.
March 4th, 2005 at 3:41 am
Marketing From Your Conscience
There’s a new article by Steve Pavlina, Marketing From Your Conscience:
“Years ago I learned a simple yet powerful marketing secret: You must become so convinc
March 4th, 2005 at 10:41 am
I had a potential customer call me today and excitedly asked “Is this software going to make me a lot of money”. And I didn’t know how to respond.
My software is a portfolio management and stock scanning system and while there’s a potential to gain an advantage in the markets using it, like most software, it will take work and is no magic bullet. It’s a tool for traders just like a hammer is a tool for carpenters.
But something in subconsious tells me that I probably won’t sell as many copies with that response. So do I tell the customer that he could make millions or do I act like a parent and give the speech about how everything takes work, blah, blah….
March 4th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
GBGames: You say that you are confused by the fact that I consider shareware and open source as two exclusive things. For the type of applications I am developing, it’s an either-or proposition.
If I release my software as open source, then I can’t release as shareware, because somebody will just take the source, compile it, and offer it for free, and my income from the shareware version will disappear.
In my opinion open source will have a huge negative impact on the wages of the software developers in the long run. Open source is often released by enthusiasts who don’t care about making a living out of software.
For me, software development is fun, it’s my hobby, but it’s also my profession, I earn my living and I want to be able to continue to earn my living by developing software. So – I love developing software, but I also want to get paid for it. This is why I don’t release open source.
I hope to retire before open source changes the software development profession into a profession with very low wages and very few employed people.
April 19th, 2005 at 8:48 am
I like the idea of “Marketing From Your Conscience”, but it doesn’t cover the problem of competitors. Following the conversation with an accountant – what if there was another accountant who was saving people $600 and was charging just $150?