Last week, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net published 9 Unsexy Truths About Making Money Online. Here they are:

1. It Takes a LOT of WORK
2. It Takes Time and Starts Slow
3. The Sexy Moments Happen – but are Often Few and Far Between
4. There Are No Guarantees
5. You’ll Fail More than You’ll Succeed
6. Some People Just Won’t Make It
7. It Can Be Lonely
8. Increased Success Can Bring Increased Critique
9. Scaling it Sucks

And I will just go on record and say right now: “Amen, amen, AMEN!”

If you haven’t read the post, go on ahead and click the link above and read it now. It will open a new window so you don’t lose your place here. I’ll wait…

If I were Ruler of Heaven and Earth, I would command everyone trying to make a living online read that post. Read it and believe it. I would also add the following:

10. DIY Sometimes Costs More Than Paying a Professional

No one is more a fan of DIY (Do It Yourself) than me. I am blessed with a wide variety of skills and talents and a healthy willingness to try just about anything once. I can build you a website, sew you an outfit, cook you a meal, replace your ceiling fan, run a chainsaw and split firewood, change your flat tire and drive you from NYC to LA without a map or directions – just to name a few.

But I can’t do everything and neither can you when it comes to making money online.

See my caricature up there in the header of this site? I paid for her…almost what I charge to build a small website, in fact. And I will admit that a part of me had a small stroke over that. But I’m glad I did it because she’s great and I couldn’t have done her (or anything close to her) myself.

If you are unwilling to pay someone for services s/he can do better than you, why should anyone pay YOU for your services?

The DIY attitude and spirit is alive and well, and I’m glad, but don’t be short-sighted. Doing some things yourself actually COSTS you more than paying a fellow professional to do it for you…like when your website looks amateurish and unprofessional because you built it yourself using free resources or you when accidentally delete it because you don’t know what you’re doing.

11. Hard Work and Spinning Your Wheels Can Look and Feel the Same

If I had a nickel for every wheel-spinning minute I’ve spent with my nose to the proverbial grindstone since 2002, I’d have $157,680 in an interest bearing account somewhere. It’s easy to be busy…more difficult to be effective in moving toward your goals.

Related to #10, this is one area where hiring a coach has made a big difference for me. And yes, I have my story of spending $3K and getting diddly of what I was promised and none of my money back (see #’s 4 and 5.) But persistence beats resistance every time.

There Is No Secret to Making Money Online

Sorry, but it’s true. There are simply a lot of different strategies and tactics others have used to successfully make money online, myself included.

As stated in #4, what works for me might not work for you, so you can’t take what I’ve done and apply it to yourself and expect my results. That equation is flawed because you are not me and I am not you.

But what you can do is get really good at #5. Try stuff. Learn when to bail, and do it early. But stick to it long enough to give it a real shot. Sound like a paradox?

That’s only because it is one.

I don’t get it.

But then…a mall is about the last place I’d go voluntarily.

What intrigues me, though, is that 3 of the people also mentioned they’d been “saving up” to do all their back-to-school shopping that weekend. Saving up? For an 8.5% sale? You’re kidding me, right?

Oh, no. These people were not kidding. They were dead serious. Why?

Great marketing. Seriously.

You see, if all the local stores were to advertise the fact that you’ll save 8.5% during this event, no one would be all that impressed. I mean, really…would you actually “save up” for an 8.5% sale?

Like adding insult to injury, we’re all kind of stuck going back-to-school shopping in one form or another. Most of our kids have grown since school let out, and we can’t send them back naked. Then there are the school supplies, the back packs, the endless list of must-haves that gets longer each year. So yeah, we’re kinda strapped in…feeling stuck…forced to spend money, which feels really bad if you don’t have it sticking out your ears.

Someone, somewhere, in a brilliant flash of insight, realized that suspending the sales tax for a short period would go a long way toward easing the pain of parting with our money by focusing our attention on the freedom from taxes, which feels really good.

I got a postcard in the mail Saturday from a school uniform shop touting a tax-free WEEK at their store. Oh yeah, baby – and I quote:

“The tax-free weekend is officially August 7-9, but we will be extending these savings to our customers for the entire week!”

So, of course, they’re the best place to buy your kid’s school uniforms because they are freeing you from taxes all. week. long.

Get it? It’s not the piddly 8.5% sale that had those people at the bank all excited. It was the freedom from the bondage and tyranny of taxes! And that feels really good – particularly in a down economy. It’s the Boston Tea Party all over again! Woo-hoo!

There will be (the retailers hope) a lot of happy shoppers in the stores on the weekend with their “saved up” funds flowing freely, shopping like they’ve lost their natural minds. And I guarantee you it won’t be the 8 1/2 cents they’re saving on every dollar that lured them there.

So how can you divert your customers’ attention from the money you want them to spend with you (that they think they don’t have or don’t want to part with because doing so feels really bad) and focus it, instead, on a way or a reason to spend money with you that makes them feel really good?

I’m interested to hear your ideas, because, at the end of the day, making the sale is hardly ever about the money.

As the days passed, I grew more and more nervous. As I said, I love my About page. I worked hard on it and practiced all that I preach. What could be so wrong that it’s taking this long for her to make her suggestions? I couldn’t take it anymore, so I emailed her about it. Here’s some (the pertinent part) of the reply I got this morning:

“Here was my problem. I loved your about page. But it wasn’t quite right. So I put on my copy editor hat and thought of all the ways I could mix it up to make it work. And it was a horrible pain in my ass and it kept not working and I was being a real bitch to Jamie about it. Bless him, he said, “When you used to do this for [insert name of evil company I used to be a copyeditor for here], didn’t you always say that if it was hard, you were doing it wrong?”

Jamie’s a f****** genius.

So I sat down again and really thought about it and realized the reason I was having such a hard time was because I was making it hard. If we made the changes I was thinking of making in the beginning, it would lose the YOU factor, and that would be stupid. Therefore, having thought of my objections and the blocks in the copy, here’s what you should do:

1. Cut the line at the beginning about “If you got here from Twitter”.
2. After the first bit about you’re the person behind vAS and your Twitter ID, add a sentence that says, IN ONE SENTENCE, what you do for a living. Benefit rich. “I help people like X do Y so that Z.”

Then the rest of the back story is interesting and nobody’s reading through it going, “Huh? When do we get to the pitch?”

After I let out a whoop and a holler in celebration, I cut the line she was talking about in #1. That leaves her second suggestion.

Now any of you who’ve worked with me know that I preach knowing who you are, what you have to offer and to whom until the cows come home. And my About page reflects all that – just not in one sentence as Naomi suggests. And she’s right – we ALL need to be able to say it in one sentence. We all need to know our X, Y and Z.

In this case, X is the “to whom” part, Y is the “what I have to offer” part and Z is a 4th, but very important element: the “what’s in it for you” part.

So let’s take mine in pieces, shall we?

X = “to whom” = entrepreneurs like you

Y = “what I have to offer” = create or improve your web presence

Z = “what’s in it for you” = you can use the web to make money doing your thing ? in this lifetime!

Now, let’s put it together:

Hey – how cool is that? It’s 139 characters, including spaces, so I could Tweet it if I wanted to. Extra handy!

Now it’s your turn. Tell me your X, Y and Z and then put it all together in the comments below.

- Who you are
- What you have to offer
- To whom you offer it

When you think about it, get one (or more) of those things wrong, and you’ll do nothing but struggle. Everything else is, as they say, just details.

For the moment, we’ll skip the ‘who you are’ part and talk about the ‘what you have to offer’ and the ‘to whom you offer it’ parts.

Anything you decide to offer is the ‘right’ thing if you’re offering it to people who want it. Conversely, anything you offer is the ‘wrong’ thing if you’re offering it to people who don’t want it. To make matters even more entertaining, this ‘right’ thing and this ‘wrong’ thing are sometimes the same thing, just offered in a different way or for a different reason.

Recently, I was talking with a good friend and client about the idea of emphasizing benefits versus features of any product or service. We agreed that benefits connect so much better with clients and customers because the overriding question everyone wants answered by anyone attempting to sell them anything is: What’s in it for me? Answer that question in a way that solves a problem or meets a need and you’ve got a sale.

Then she dropped a bomb on me. She said, “You know how you’re always talking about how WordPress is so great because it allows me to be my own webmaster? Well, that phrase – ‘be my own webmaster’ – strikes terror in my heart and I don’t hear anything you say after that. You sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me.”

Whoa! Really?

She went on to tell me that, to her, the phrase ‘be my own webmaster’ meant doing things she didn’t understand, having to learn a bunch of new stuff she didn’t have time to learn and suddenly being saddled with a whole lot of extra stuff to do that she knew nothing about, leaving little, if any, time to work in or on her business. My benefit was her barrier.

She wasn’t itching to be her own webmaster. She wanted a way to connect with her target market, help people get to know, like and trust her and convert them into clients through a process of self-selection. In other words, she wanted a way to build a platform, get her message out and attract her ideal clients to her in a non-sleazy, no hype way. Big difference in benefit. Same product/service delivered.

This phenomena is probably my strongest argument for niche marketing. The bigger the group you target as your market, the more diverse and plentiful the problems and needs you’ll have to address to get the sale. This is why I say when you market to everyone, you’re really marketing to no one.

Of my target market, only a percentage ‘want to be their own webmaster’. But all of them want to connect with their target market and attract their clients in a non-sleazy, no-hype way. So I have to pay attention to how I offer what I offer. So do you.

Being Authentic Is Intimidating

In my experience, being your authentic self can feel pretty damn intimidating. Bringing that authenticity to your business and online presence(s) feels damn near suicidal, in many ways. We don’t want to feel alone, sticking out like a sore thumb, even if the reason we stick out is that we’re truly great and gifted at something. What if people laugh? What if no one buys? What if we’re just weird, too ‘out there’, too much for most folks? We’re conditioned to conform, fit in, go with the flow.

Authenticity is Extremely Attractive

On the other hand, what attracts you? Isn’t it authenticity? Isn’t it the person or business that stands out from the rest in some authentic way? Doesn’t authenticity inspire, at the very least, some small sense of automatic trust in you? It does me, if only because I can sense that this person is being ‘real’ with me.

This is the paradox of authenticity in marketing online, for me: we find authenticity the most attractive in others, yet we’re scared shitless to be authentic and stick out from the crowd ourselves.

To Thine Own Self Be True

I firmly believe that each of us has a reason for being here, something to offer that no one else can deliver quite as well. “To thine own self be true” is not a statement of selfishness, but of authenticity – the best strategy for success. I am not here to be just like you or just like anyone else. Neither are you. You are here to be you and to be true to that is something only you can really pull off.

Marketing to Everyone Means You’re Marketing to No One

If you commit to being authentic in your business, you are also committing, whether you know it or not, to finding your niche and marketing exclusively to it. Boldly being your real self, letting the world know who you really are is sure to turn off some people. That’s ok, and as it should be. None of us is everyone’s cup of tea. But for the people who are in need of what we offer, exactly the way we offer it, we are a dream come true. And they’ll never find us if we don’t put our real selves out there. They’ll have to settle for something else, something less than what they want.

When we attempt to appeal to everyone who might possibly benefit from what we offer, we think we are increasing our chances of finding new customers, but what we are really doing is generalizing our marketing to the point of speaking to no one at all. And then we wonder why we have no new clients.

Be Authentic – Market to Your Niche

A crazy thing happens when we get specific: we create curiosity in those whose name we are not calling. By marketing ourselves to the specific niche we serve, we actually attract interest from those outside that niche. If you’re a parent coach who specifically serves the niche of parents with strong-willed children (the politically correct term for hellion), parents who have a wild child whose behavior consistently drives them to distraction are going to come to you. You’re going to attract interest from parents whose kids only sometimes act out and try to drive them to drink. But if you market yourself more generically as simply a parent coach, well…from that frazzled parent’s perspective, it’s more of a crap shoot whether you could help them, or not. Niche marketing, in the long run, actually gives you a better shot at gaining new clients or customers. And the best part is they come to you.

Practicing What I Preach

This year has been about defining my niche and rearranging my business to serve it. (December 6th begins my 7th year in business, so I’m thinking I’ve resisted long enough, ya know?) But like so small business owners, I was convinced I’d be cutting off my nose to spite my face if I zeroed in on a specific niche. Quite the contrary, actually. My business has more than doubled this year, as a result. And more importantly, I’m having a whole lot more fun and I get referrals out the wazoo!

(Note: A year ago, I would never have put ‘I get referrals out the wazoo’ on my website. But that’s who I am and how I talk and I’m putting my real self out here these days.)

I’m working exclusively in WordPress now and I’m bringing more of a teaching element to my business than ever before because that’s a) something I love to do, b) something I’m really good at and c) something that lots of small business owners want. My specialty is teaching bloggers how to do the things they think are beyond their ability, proving to them that they are far more capable than they give themselves credit for. Will I still do the technical stuff for you? Heck yeah, but if you want to learn how to do it yourself, you’ve found a teacher who speaks your language and won’t make you feel dumb for what you don’t know.

So, tell me – what’s your specialty?