I’ve been in the business of providing a service for several years now and one thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a general disdain amongst service professionals toward commoditization. Example: I used to be in the mortgage business (before the shit storm) and the idea of selling mortgages as a service, where the mortgage broker/loan officer acts more like a financial adviser than just a salesman is heavily promoted as a way to really succeed over the long-term in that business. It influenced me quite a bit, but the more I learn about business and the more time I spend running my own business, the more I’m starting to realize commoditization of services is actually a good thing for both the client and the service professional.

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I’m reading the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Social Psychologist Robert Cialdini, PH.D., and was so amazed at this I thought I’d share it:

A group of researchers, composed of doctors and nurses with connections to three midwestern hospitals, became increasingly concerned with the extent of mechanical obedience to doctors’ orders on the part of nurses. It seemed to the researchers that even highly trained and skilled nurses were not using that training or skill sufficiently to check on a doctor’s judgment; instead, when confronted with a physician’s directives, they would simply defer.

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It’s laughable sometimes how poorly statistics are interpreted. I see it all the time in the media especially, but your average Joe isn’t exactly a stats genius either. Here’s a pretty good excerpt from an report published by Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis about Probable Coincidences.

PROBABLE COINCIDENCES
Most people have experienced one or more events in their lives that seem to be improbable coincidences. Some such events are so surprising that they attract media attention, often with estimates of how improbable they are. For instance, Plous (1993) reported a story in which a Mr. and Mrs. Richard Baker left a shopping mall, found what they thought was their car in the parking lot, and drove away. A few minutes later they realized that they had the wrong car. They returned to the parking lot to find the police waiting for them. It turned out that the car they were driving belonged to another Mr. Baker, who had the same car, with an identical key! Plous reported that the police estimated the odds at a million to one. The problem with such stories and computations, is that are based on asking the wrong question. The computation most likely applies to that exact event happening. A more logical question is, what is the probability of that or a similar event happening sometime, somewhere, to someone. In most cases, that probability would be very large. For instance, I was once on a television talk show about luck, with a man who had won the million dollar New York State lottery twice, and the host of the show thought this demonstrated extraordinary luck. While it may have been wonderful for that individual, Diaconis and Mosteller (1989) report that there is about an even chance of the same person winning a state lottery in the United States in a seven year period. That was precisely the interval between the two wins for this person. Remember that there are over six billion people in the world, with many circumstances occurring to each one daily. Therefore, there are surely going to be some that seem incredible. In fact if something has only a one in a million probability of happening in a given day, it will happen, on average, to over 6000 people in the world, each day. When the media reports an incredible coincidence, psychic prediction, and so on, it should be viewed from this perspective.

I’ve got to say I’ve become a little annoyed with all the damn make money online websites/blogs out there. There are so many of them. As an aside I considered creating one just because, in spite of what everyone says, that niche ain’t near its saturation point. There are so many people reading this tripe that you just have to write better than a 3rd grader and you should do fine.

Ok, exagerating a little there, but here’s what really annoys me…Some of these blogs are so huge and everyone’s soaking up this information like it’s so great, but do you think those bloggers are telling you what really works? Sure, you get the occasional post after the fact like Shoemoney did on his 10k PPC experiment post, which was pretty good, but most of these bloggers are not telling you anything cutting edge and unique. They’re telling you what they did, not what they’re doing. “Leave comments on other blogs, submit to article directories, blah blah blah blah.” Guess what, there’s a million ways to make money online, but you can be damn sure that if everyone’s talking about it you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s kind of like the Real Estate market. All these idiots were buying up properties left and right when, especially in California, they were so grossly, and obviously overpriced that a bust was inevitable. And you know why all those people kept buying real estate at absolutely ridiculous prices? Because everyone else was telling them to. And you know what my first rule of business is? If everyone’s talking about it, it’s already passed it’s prime.

Why do I talk about this like I know what I’m talking about? Because I do. I used to read all those make money online bloggers every day and never got very far. Once it dawned on me that these guys weren’t going to tell me their secrets, and the secrets are where the money’s at, I quit reading…well, everyday at least. I still read those blogs occasionally, but I used to read John Chow everyday, now I couldn’t give a shit less about doing the stuff I read there and making $1 a day, which is all most bloggers are ever going to make.

So, what do I do now that I’m not drooling over what Yaro Starak has to say? Several things…

1. I write programs to do things for me. I taught myself how to do this because if you can’t do this or afford to pay someone who can, you’re lost. Now I get twice as much done with half the effort, and I haven’t even tapped a fraction of what’s possible with automation.
2. I research other sites. I still visit Problogger occasionally and the others, but it’s mostly to weave my way through the web and find some hints at what someone else is doing that appears to be working for them. Because like I said, no one is going to tell you the best secrets…you have to figure them out for yourself or take them from someone who gets a little careless with covering his/her tracks.
3. I started to focus much more attention on building links. And building links one at a time by leaving comments on other blogs is an absolute waste of time. If it means you take 6 months to build one single link because you’re spending all your time learning to build links like a champ, then you’re better off doing that.
4. And above all, automation is my number one priority. Not writing content, not chatting it up with other website owners. If I have some programming I can do to make my life easier/build links faster, I do it before I write. As a result, my posting frequency has dropped, but in spite of that, traffic is doing quite well. I’ve made more progress on all my sites & business in the 3 months since I quit spending all my time reading that I did in the entire year before that.

So, quit wasting time reading everyone’s blog and start figuring out what nobody’s telling you.

Update: I got a little careless with my wording in an article on another site and that day Google dropped that site to PR 0. I haven’t heard back from Google on that, so I’m still not sure if that article was actually the problem. Anyway, if you’re with the “G”, please keep in mind I’m not spamming! None of what I say about automation above is spamming. It’s about automating the tracking of various sites and implementing some things that my visitors request that I wasn’t able to do before because I couldn’t program, and especially, providing real value with automation, like interactive tools, etc… So, don’t go getting overzealous on me again.

Over the past year or so I’ve really burned through a lot of Wordpress themes that I used for short periods of time and then abandoned. I finally dug up those old themes, dusted them off, and packaged them for download. So, my first one is a mod I did on Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme. The theme can be demoed and downloaded here.

And here’s a screenshot for those interested…