Don’t do what you don’t love

Wed, Feb 8, 2006

My Projects

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

Armor and Swords 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.

2 Comments For This Post

  1. Mike Duffy Says:

    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.

  2. Adam Says:

    You could make an X-rated version of Monkey Phone Call.

2 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Simplicity Rules » Blog Archive » The best way to get traffic online Says:

    [...] 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. [...]

  2. Simplicity Rules » Gone Raw lately? Says:

    [...] Start with something about which you are passionate [...]

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