Comments on: Sell Ice Cream, Not Cream and Ice

By: » How much traffic do you get from being on the front page of Hacker News? - Currently Obsessed

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:47:54 +0000

[...] week’s post “Sell Ice Cream, Not Cream and Ice” received 30X the traffic that I my blog posts normally [...]

By: joe heitzeberg

joe heitzeberg — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:23:09 +0000

Good point, if they already have marketers on staff they are paying, then that is different. Perhaps since offline marketing (which presumably is what these folks are skilled in doing) is very different than online, they simply see paying for the leads as a convenience. I imagine that retraining and retooling these people to do leadgen style marketing directly would take time and investment and not payoff in the short term.

Thanks for the reference to the article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/business/14sc...)

By: daveschappell

daveschappell — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:56:41 +0000

I agree with the sentiment, Joe (make money… period… and thus you're demonstrating a value-add), but continue to disagree with your analogy. In this case, the colleges have people who are supposed to be experts at marketing, and who should at least be attempting to acquire the leads directly. If they can afford to pay a company to give them leads, then they should be able to afford to outbid those same companies on premium paid-search placements and/or hire smart young entrepreneurs like yourself to help them with SEO, content, and the like. The 'buy ice cream' in this case where there are businesses just doesn't make sense to me — the front-page NY Times article today talks about the real problems in the higher-ed lead-gen space (that what's really being sold here is debt for students, on top of higher education loans paid for by taxpayers, provided by non-value-add schools).

So, I think I'm more in the camp of your first commenter (taking the high ground of 'build something you believe in', but be sure you're generating cash out of the bottom of your money engine).