Making money twice

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1256-making-money-twice

by brm • 18 years ago

120 36 18 years ago

shafqat• 18 years ago

Interesting post. Not everyone can get away with repackaging though. You better be damn sure you're content is amazing before trying to serve it up over and over again. Otherwise it'll just piss people off.

They get away with because the content itself is so valuable.

jgrahamc• 18 years ago

Repackaging can in itself by useful. I wrote a column about GNU Make for a long time and finally turned it into a PDF and Book via Lulu and it's very convenient for people to have all the columns (which I reedited) all in one place.

mixmax• 18 years ago

I would actually say that the content isn't spectacular. It isn't bad by any means - but not in a league of it's own either. Getting real can probably best be described as a cooked down version of common sense and business 101.

What is amazing though is the marketing - which is what this post is all about. I'm sure that at least one third of the people on this site could create the same content if they put their mind to it. What almost nobody can do though is market it like 37signals.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

"at least one third of the people on this site could create the same content if they put their mind to it"

I'll give you that your one third could produce the ideas, but how many could also produce the straightforward, simple, clear writing? It's harder than it looks.

cmos• 18 years ago

The content is niche. And they advertise well, since this is a 'customer base' for them. If I were selling car parts, I'd have articles about cars, and post on message boards that are car focused.

They are a good example of what you could do in your niche industry.

iigs• 18 years ago

The point behind repackaging, as mentioned in the article, is that you point it at different people. Perhaps an individual contributor reads something on the web, sees that their boss might enjoy or learn from it, and buys the PDF for the boss in order to give them something to read while on the plane.

The conferences are probably second exposures for most people, but that's probably ok because the medium is so different -- people will get different things out of an interactive forum than a (relatively) static set of blog posts.

skmurphy2• 18 years ago

Our experience has been that different audiences like to consume the same content in different ways: blog, print, workshop presentation, and workbook. Many complex software application development teams face the same challenge: they need to produce documentation (print & on-line), training materials (print, wiki, presentations) on-line help, application notes (print, web, presentations).

known• 18 years ago

Japanese, Koreans and Chinese economies and Microsoft are the successful examples of repackaging.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

If you have an audience it is easier to sell many products. You can repackage all your blog posts into whatever you want, but if there is not much people who come across it, you wont make much.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Um, you won't have an audience until you start distribution though. There was a time that 37S didn't have any audience at all, and that wasn't too long ago.

alex_c2• 18 years ago

Hmmm... the flip side of this advice, of course, would be "don't spread yourself too thin", or "pick one thing and do it well"...

brandnewlow2• 18 years ago

That's not a flip side at all.

What they're talking about here is the "do it well." They're making an argument that doing it well involves repackaging that one thing you're doing for multiple audiences.

Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other.

t0pj• 18 years ago

Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other.

Don't forget the third half; getting people to give a damn (i.e. marketing).

alex_c2• 18 years ago

>repackaging that one thing you're doing

I'm saying that the one thing 37signals does is making and selling productivity web apps. They've managed to find a great synergy between selling their "real" product and their marketing - which includes their blog, conferences, the "37signals way" - and they are talking about selling the byproducts of their marketing.

My point is that this isn't necessarily always a great strategy. If you're making plastic widgets, I'm not convinced you should spend effort on selling "working with plastic" e-books.

jrockway• 18 years ago

FWIW, this doesn't always work. I know of a certain columnist who took some of his columns and had them made into a book (via Apress). Well, nobody bought the book and he now has several thousand of them sitting in his garage. I picked up 5 of the books when he was giving them away, meaning to give them to coworkers two jobs ago. I forgot, and now they take up a lot of space.

(This was the publisher's loss, though, not his. That's the way to do things :)

LogicHoleFlaw2• 18 years ago

Vanity presses are risky that way. These days I think print-on-demand is the way to go for small runs like that.

mooneater• 18 years ago

Easier once you are already well known.

notauser• 18 years ago

But also less essential.

Which is more important (for one person), 4x$25k or 4x$250k?

I would argue 4x$25k - as that is enough to go independant - miss capitalising on one revenue source and you are toast. The person with a single $250k income stream may never bother looking for the other three opportunities that are out there.

henning• 18 years ago

They have been well-known, but it's because they were saying smart things even back in the dot-com bubble: amidst the insanity of Pets.com, they were the ones citing the Dutch tulip mania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) on their homepage as part of their pitch to potential clients and the world as a whole.

cousin_it• 18 years ago

This must be how people transition from doing useful work to being marketing gurus etc. Yeah it pays, but it's bad for the soul :-) I recall Phillip J. Eby, once an unusually smart Python programmer, now a self-help author.

rglullis• 18 years ago

Thank you for your comment. I thought I was the only one that read this post as "more ways to keep milking money from the same suckers."

They already cried foul when Google did a product that was slightly similar to Campfire. Now, I'd love to see their reaction if someone decided to "repackage" one of their products on their own.

LogicHoleFlaw2• 18 years ago

To be fair, there is value in both editing and variety of presentation. And it can even be measured in dollars, if this article is anything to go by.

jacobbijani• 18 years ago

Repackaging someone else's content and repackaging your own content are two extremely different things.

alextp• 18 years ago

It was kinda sad reading his blog while he made the jump. The first few self-help-ish posts were actually ok, but the rest were just annoying.

j2d22• 18 years ago

This is bordering on something I'd expect Donald Trump to suggest. Whether or not it can make money, it's a tactic I usually expect people like Trump or Robert Kiyosaki to promote and I start tuning out...

whatusername• 18 years ago

Really? How so? It's not that they were necessarily selling to the same people 6 times? In one sense all they were doing is "making something (in a format) people want"

Some people read blogs - that's great - they got the info Some people only just found out about them and want the easy full back story - that's great - buy an ebook. Some people hate ebooks, but love the tactile feel of paper - buy the book Some people are more audible and need to hear it spoken to them - go to the conference..

All they did was come up with an idea once - and then present it in different and more appropriate ways to different people. How is that Trump tactics?

Note - I realise that some people will buy the content multiple times - but honestly - this is a capitalist society, and they obviously derive some benefit from it...

j2d22• 18 years ago

Because they're telling us to pay them to teach us how to be successful just like them. Follow our easy program and you'll get rich, just like us!

I'm aware we live in a capitalist society. It's fine to make money. I'm saying it won't be my money.

axod• 18 years ago

http://decknetwork.net/

Jesus Christ do they have to shout quite so loud?

skmurphy2• 18 years ago

We are doing some of those, not to as large an audience as 37signals. One thing that makes it difficult is a lack of good tools to re-purpose content across blogs, wiki, web, print, presentations, animation/video, and PDF. We do workshops where we have the content both as a presentation (slides), a workbook/handout, and in a wiki. It's a lot of extra work right now. Conceptually we develop/refine in a wiki and deliver as presentation (PPT slides), print, and wiki (slimmed down, that is then available as an on-line notebook where further work can be done). I have contact info in my profile and would welcome any suggestions for tools that make it easy to develop and re-purpose content.

Hutzpah• 18 years ago

Emacs Muse Mode. Write the thing in Muse. Than export it to whatever you like it's everything available: wiki, html, pdf, latex and so on.

Making money twice

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