When “Success” Misleads You

When Guy Kawasaki invited me to videotape his upcoming interview with Steve Wozniak, I jumped at the opportunity.

After all, Kawasaki and Wozniak are two of my long time heroes, another one being Steve Jobs. To be able to videotape and actually meet and have conversations with these guys was truly a major event in my life. Well, I had that opportunity, I took it, and I’m glad I did.

I also wanted to have something major on my ZBIZ.TV site to build awareness, and hopefully RSS subscriptions while I was at it. So I saw this as the perfect opportunity.

So I bought the cheapest Manchester, NH < => San Jose tickets I could find, booked a hotel room where the event was being held, flew out, taped that night, flew back the next morning, edited it and submitted it to Veotag for processing, and by Sunday night had it up and running on ZBIZ.TV.

Guy Kawasaki linked to the interview and the visitors started to pour in. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had more than 25,000 people come by and watch that video.

In terms of having exciting content that attracted viewers, I couldn’t have done better. As I speak, people are still pouring in to the site to watch the Kawasaki - Woz interview.

It’s a very heady experience.

But the fact of the matter is, it wasn’t the success that I would have liked to have had.

I attracted a ton of people who loved Woz and wanted to see the interview, but relatively few who were interested in seeing other interviews with entrepreneurs.

25,000 people came through, but very few of them checked out other interviews on the site. Not a single one subscribed to my RSS feed. And I didn’t think to put up an email subscription form, so my net gain for all of this was an ego boost and a thrill but no long term effect for ZBIZ.

But it was a valuable lesson for me.

I knew better than to handle things the way I did… or should I say, didn’t.

As 2006 closes out and 2007 closes in, I’m putting my business activities through a thorough examination to see what I could do to deliver real value to my audience and hopefully, turn that into real business opportunities in return. The thing is, a lot of this is just reminding myself of what I already know and have done and done successfully.

If I had to do it over again, I’d have my RSS Feed subscription much more prominent than I now do, and would have had an email subscription form in there as well.

But hey, you live and you learn.

I would still do it again, only differently this time.