Jim Logan points out that the world is full of crap marketing. And that’s your opportunity. Because the more crap is in the world, the easier it is to shine above it all. And there is more crap now than ever, because it is so cheap and easy to get on the web. But the whole story has an interesting implication that Jim missed.

In the old days, it was relatively expensive to get into marketing. You had to print and mail a lot of pieces. Even the first infomercials: They were considered cheap for the day, because it was just a guy in front of a camera, and it was aired during excess time the TV stations were giving away for free. Now, it’s way expensive to do an infomercial. But back then, it was cheap. And that was still harder then than it is today to put up a website.

As a result, there is a lot of crap on the web. (I’ve even been responsible for some of it, in my day.) Jim writes:

The barrier is extremely low to produce a website, write a blog, print brochures, mail letters, disperse flyers, print cards, etc. Everyone and anyone in business can do it. That’s the problem. People without a clue do it…

Your opportunity is to not produce crap. So don’t.

One implication of this is that you should put in the time, expense, and planning to make sure your website is not crap. But I think there’s another way to look at this.

Yes, there are a lot of people churning out crap. But that’s not primarily because of the low cost of entry! It’s because they don’t measure results. Every direct-response copywriter has tested campaigns in his career with surprising results. With experience, we learn what tends to work well, and under what conditions. But none of us is a mind-reader. At the end of the day, there’s only way for sure to know whether what we’re producing is crap. And that is, we need to measure how well it works.

The thing is, this is also much cheaper and easier than it used to be. Technology cuts both ways. The barrier to entry is lower for everyone. It’s easier for the clueless to churn out crap. But that means it’s now possible for small businesses, even micro-businesses, to do quality marketing formerly only possible with big-company marketing budgets.

If you don’t know whether or not an idea is crap, you may face the question, “Should I invest in this website? How do I know that it will pay off?” Thanks to the low barrier to entry, the answer now is, you just try it. Don’t spend a lot of money on it, at first. Just test the concept, in actual use. Then, as much as it turns out not to be crap, you keep doing it. And you invest more in it. And you improve it.

But it’s that “it turns out not to be crap” part. That’s the kicker. Because how do you know whether or not it’s crap? You measure it, of course!

This yields an unexpected conclusion. Because while there’s more opportunity for crap, there’s equally more opportunity for not crap. You see, the problem is not the low barrier to entry. The problem—and the opportunity—is to measure whether your website works.

-TimK

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