[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by jerryflattum

I definitely have something to sell. But, I have what maybe could be characterized as a Target or WallMart issue. What does Wallmart sell? Everything. Shouldn't Wallmart have a separate website for groceries from clothing?

Wal-Mart sells physical goods: doorknobs, salad dressing, bookshelves, paper, whatever. It doesn't matter how many categories you break those goods down into, the bottom line is that Wal-Mart sells you a thing of some sort. You carry it home, or they mail it to you, but when all is said and done, you've got a turnip twaddler.

Take me as a counter-example: I sell consulting services. If you pay me, you don't get a a doorknob or a bookshelf, or even a turnip twaddler. You get the benefit of my expertise, and you get a very non-tangible website if you've contracted me to produce one of those, but there's nothing you can put in a bag.

In the case of the Wall Street Journal, they sell access to parts of their website. I've heard their paywall isn't doing all that well, financially-speaking, so they may not be selling it very well, or they may not have a big enough market that wants to buy it, but they're selling access to website content.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about: not which individual items are you selling, but which kind of thing are you selling? You wouldn't sell ebooks the same way I sell website design work, and neither of us would sell them like the WSJ sells content access. But in order to sell our things properly, we need to first determine exactly what they are.

Yes, the content is different from each other. But, the purpose of the company is to provide music, writing and entertainment content online.

WRONG.

The purpose of the company is to make you money.

The means by which it makes you money is by selling music, ebooks, or whatever. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is to. make. you. money. Get that wrong and you're not building your skyscraper without a plan; you're building it with one side in a swamp.

So when I mix music with books with web applications, people think that's crazy if not downright impossible.

Lots of people do it. Anybody who thinks it's crazy or impossible does not know what they're talking about.

But, I readily admit a need for clarity and focus. That's why I'm considering multiple sites.

Multiple websites multiply your problems, not divide them. This is not something you want.

But I'm also considering multiple sites for the simple reason I have the wrong Wordpress theme. It's column-based and columns are static. There's no space to put stuff (a real estate issue).

Your website is an unholy mess. Picking a different template will not fix that problem. Learning website design -- not the mechanics of building, but the principles of design -- will start you off on dealing with that. Have you ordered the books I listed yet?

But, it's not just one vs. multiple sites. It also depends of software and web applications. I need two databases, one for the production music library, one for the Entertainment Cyberscope-Portal.

And the latter does ... what, exactly?

But, given that whatever I think of seems to have a ready-made application solution, maybe there's one database solution that allows the building of multiple databases within one.

It's called any database program. I'm personally fond of MySQL.

It's not an insane idea. It's very plausible. But I happen to be a nobody and a nobody has no credibility.

You do realize, I hope, that Steven Spielberg started out as a nobody. Bill Gates was a nobody. Mark Zuckerberg was a nobody. It's not whether you have any credibility; it's whether your idea has credibility -- and specifically, whether your idea looks like it's going to make a bunch of money for anyone who gets involved.

Read one of my personal favorite xkcd comics here. Take it to heart. Modern capitalism is that ruthlessly profit-focused. If you have a good enough idea, and the ability to implement it, someone will be interested even if you're Mickey Mouse because it can make them money.

If I was a successful songwriter and could afford to pay you to implement my crazy ideas, you'd laugh a lot less.

I seriously considered demanding an apology for that, but I decided you probably don't realize how much you just insulted me.

I am not for sale.

If I laugh at your ideas, it is not because you're not paying me; it's because your ideas are laughable.

And we'll end this line of discussion now before steam starts to come out of my ears.

20 years ago, if I told you I had this idea for connecting all the computers in the world, well, need I say more.

20 years ago was 11 years after my first newsgroup post on ARPAnet, which is what the Internet was first called. So I would have told you "no big deal, it's been done."

I may have wandered off on a tirade here but I really don't need someone to tell what I can and can't do. I need someone to help me do it.

If you want my professional advice -- and you're getting a fair bit of it, and for free -- you can just stifle yourself and listen, and say "Yes, Worldwalker, thank you, Worldwalker." If you only want to go staggering off in random directions like a drunken sailor, then don't bother asking for advice, just buy a copy of E-Commerce for Dummies and have at it.

The most successful songs are called "cross-over" hits. They don't fit in a single bag.

But they're songs delivered electronically, not doorknobs delivered by UPS. That's the difference I'm talking about.

I fully appreciate the need to define what it is I'm selling and who I'm selling to. Again, I need help in accomplishing that goal.

I'm going to be brutally frank here:

If you need help figuring out what you're selling and who you're selling to, you do not have a product. You do not have customers. You have a hobby. You are not going to get people to give you money for your hobby, nor can anyone else tell you how to get them to give you money. You, and you alone, know what your products are and who your customers are. You need to be a lot further advanced than you are now before you even begin to start plotting out an online business. You're not ready to do this yet. Say to yourself "Descartes. Descartes. Descartes."

I'm very holistic in how I operate. I don't think the design of the site is any less important than what SEO plugin I use or the quality of any given original song. It's all equally important. And integration, coherency and focus is critical.

Most of the time, "everything is equally important" comes out in practice to "everything is equally unimportant."

To the devil with the details. They're just that: details. You need to focus on structure first, and the details can come later. Your site could be black text on a white background and sell product hand over fist if you have "heroin content", and it could be the best website in the world and do nothing but burn bandwidth if you don't have something people want to buy, or the people who might buy it aren't going there. The quality of the songs matters, and it matters a lot. I'm not going to buy a crappy song. I'll buy a good song from a crappy website, but I will not buy a crappy song from any kind of website, no matter how holistic it claims to be.

You can't just flounder around and expect everything to work. Nor can you expect other people to put in thousands of dollars worth of unpaid work, to your exact specs, and do your job for you. The Hollywood enthusiasm isn't impressing anyone; you're starting to look like a Popeil pitchman. "But wait -- there's more!"

If you want this to work, then quit spending so much time defending the way you're (not) doing things and pay attention to what the experts are telling you about the way you should be doing things.

Also, go to Amazon right now and order those books. You need to read them.