This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The truth about your funnel
It’s not going to be a magical fountain of results.
I hope it will, but it’s pretty unlikely.
While there are plenty of people happy to sell you a miracle—a self-
running, passive funnel of income—these magical funnels are rare.
That’s because the lifetime value of a new customer rarely exceeds the
cost of running the ads necessary to get a new customer.
People are so distrustful, and the web is so cluttered, that the ads rarely
have enough power to pay for themselves. People see so many ads, with so
many promises, that the cost of engagement has gone through the roof.
The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organizations that
thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing. They grow
because users evangelize to their friends. They grow because they are living
entities, offering ever more value to the communities they serve. They grow
because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they’re
able to produce.
The work you put into improving your funnel is effort well spent. But
attempts to build a perpetual motion machine of profit almost always end
with bitterness, because they require you to push too hard and too fast to do
anything that lasts.
The goal is to prime the pump with ads that are aimed at neophiliacs,
people looking to find you. Then build trust with frequency. To gain trial.
To generate word of mouth. And to make it pay by building a cohort of
people, a network that needs your work to be part of who they are and what
they do.
It’s easy to skip the last part, the stuff that happens after the first click.
And if you only do the easy, expensive part, you’ll almost certainly be
unhappy with the outcome.
Life on the long tail
Chris Anderson’s breakthrough work on the long tail can be easily
understood with a simple graph:

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