Don’t do what you don’t love
Sometimes in fits of over-analysis, I decide to try to apply lessons learned one place to something I don’t care about. This has yet to really work.
Paul Graham says Do What You Love. Below are a couple examples where I didn’t follow that advice.
Fantasy Football
Before last Sunday’s Super Bowl, I hadn’t watched a football game in two years. Yet, I gave fantasy football a shot last season. My thought was to see if I could use my statistical analysis skills I picked up from fantasy baseball. It’s just numbers, right?
I quickly lost interest and sank to the bottom of the league.
Replica Sword
Sure, giant medieval swords look cool, but I’m not really the Ren-Faire type. However, I wanted to test another affiliate program (like my Amazon/Adwords experiment). I signed up, grabbed the datafeed, and made a cool “which sword is more badass” game. Then I started sending traffic to it.
What a failure. People came, but they didn’t buy. Not a single user even clicked. The site was awful and I didn’t even dare enough to make it better. Luckily, I only blew about $50 (plus time) on this experiment.
Conclusion
Succeeding at something I’m not interested in is hard. It’s a huge barrier to get past and there are so many other ideas out there. Granted, playing a fantasy sport I enjoy could still land me at the bottom of the standings. And I could easily blow fifty bucks on keywords I like more than “medieval sword.” At least it would have been fun.
I’m still trying to figure out what products might be appropriate for an AdWords campaign involving “hot monkey love”.
Thanks for posting - always nice to hear from you.
You could make an X-rated version of Monkey Phone Call.
[…] When I started in on my last affiliate experiment, my goal was to do good stuff. I was going to write my own descriptions and pretend like I actually cared about medieval swords. It was tough to buckle down and do it. Doing good stuff is hard. […]
[…] Start with something about which you are passionate […]