a note to the marketing geniuses out there

So I get a lot of advice about marketing and some is better than others. The really good stuff is what I am trying to implement, but here is the problem ...

I currently spend about six hours per day dealing with online stuff that needs my immediate attention. And I spend about five hours a day with stuff at wheaton labs that needs my immediate attention. The rest of my waking hours is for

- online stuff that needs my longer term attention
- laboratory stuff that needs my longer term attention
- new stuff

Under the realm of "new stuff" is:

- improve the marketing for the dvds or the cards
- get more cash flow
- start a new project
- build the empire
- start a new project at the laboratory
- move a current long term project into the kickstarter phase

I had hoped that when the WBS2 dvd set came out, it would sell a few copies a day and that would be lovely. I thought the playing cards would be similar. And even the WDG 3-DVD set.

I was wrong. They pretty much just gather dust. And it would seem that the problem is: marketing. There are things to do to make them sell well. I have learned that if I do these things, I do sell lots more. The trick is that my knowledge is limited. And my time.

I now have enough materials for five more kickstarters. I also see the path for creating ten more beyond that. I have three big books already in the works, and the foundations for six little books. Plus heaps of stuff for hundreds of free podcasts and videos in the future.

So far I have learned that doing the marketing stuff is a full time job. And I don't have full time available. But even more than that: I would rather focus on creating new content than focus on marketing stuff.

I've set the 4-DVD set up on scubbly for instant download. $45 with a 40% affiliate fee. $18 per sale. I have lame marketing skills and I sold 1000 copies for $100 in a year. I would think somebody with awesome marketing skills could sell 50,000 copies at $45 in a year. Or maybe a bunch of people would do that.

Even more, I would think that such a person could build a residual income stream this way. So the funds keep rolling in for years without further effort.

But most importantly, if one or more people did this, then I would turn my focus to pumping out new content.

Further, I kinda think that there are some marketing people that think they could bring in some serious bank with these products - but if I create twice as many products, they would make twice as much.

So this thread is all about how sometimes whining pays. If I say nothing, then nothing definitely happens. But sometimes if you make whining sounds about the things you want, it turns out there really is a person out there that will be a match and everything will turn out damn spiffy.

paul wheaton wrote:
I've set the 4-DVD set up on scubbly for instant download. $45 with a 40% affiliate fee. $18 per sale. I have lame marketing skills and I sold 1000 copies for $100 in a year. I would think somebody with awesome marketing skills could sell 50,000 copies at $45 in a year. Or maybe a bunch of people would do that.

Agreed, but the skill set/personality type of an uber marketer is not likely to align closely with the type of people on the permies board. We just don't seem the right fit - great as customers perhaps, but not with knowledge and means to sell product.

Secondly, my in my experience of people with those marketing skill that kind of commission just isn't appealing enough. They weigh up their options of products to sell based on their % cut, the likely size of the market and the $/sale. There are products out there with 60% commission on $200 or more. $18 per sale for selling your DVDs to the (small) permaculture market, vrs $120. My limited experience of these type of digital products was that those with higher sales commissions sold FAR more than those with lower commissions.

So my advice would probably be to up your commission rates, or have some kind of escalator... 40% on the first 10 sales, 50% on the next 40, 60% on all the rest. A highly motivated seller will bring in far more for you than one with better products to sell.

Hello Paul:

I have a very lengthy reply to this thread, but because of its length, it may not be relevant to everyone who may want to participate in this thread. Therefore, I sent it to your publicly listed email address. The content of the reply doesn't deal with the specificity of the challenges you outline here (which I believe are symptomatic), but touches on a deeper set of principles that eventually will encompass those challenges. The response's length and presumptions could annoy, but I trust it is received in the sprit in which is it given ... a desire for your and permies success.

Dan,

I read your email. I think you are right. And, at the same time it says: build a good strategy, complete with a brand. It sounds like something four people could do in three months. So if those people work 40 hours a week that would be ... 13 weeks * 40 hours per week * 4 = 2080 hours. If I have two hours a day for growth and pushing new projects forward, and I work seven days a week, I could get there in 2.5 years. Of course, those people would be experts and I am not, so it could take me 4 years. So that would mean I stop all new stuff for 4 years. Urk.

Okay - what if that same team was told "you have one week!" They might come up with something that is 70% as good as if they use the full three months. And I should be able to complete this mission in four months instead of four years.

So - a bit easier to digest. Now the question is that if I postpone all growth for four months to develop strategy and brand, will it be worth it. I honestly believe: yes, it will be totally worth it. At the same time, I am very concerned that I am not wired to do it right. Not only is it an area I know really nothing about, but if You placed the book in front of me and said "this book has magic powers - in just two hours of reading, you will be 20 years ahead of people with 40 years of experience" - I just won't read it. It's like it is pure, clear water and I am oil. So I am worried (and I confess that this is an irrational personal problem) that it would be one of those tasks where it is at the tippy top of my 80 page list of priorities. And nothing will get done as I find every cheap excuse in the book to dodge doing this thing. In the meantime i cannot do the other things, because I HAVE TO do the first thing on the list first.

What you propose is logical, reasonable and wise. And it is as if it is my kryptonite. When the discovery channel was here i was thinking that it would be cool to get something started because their people would handle exactly that and I would not have to worry a bit about it. I could do my thing and they would have "people" that would take care of the rest, including brand and strategy.

Hey Paul:

I’m flattered you got through my email. And, I see from your response that you understand.

It’s a wise person who understands himself. In your specific situation, I think a 70% solution to what I proposed is tenable and can set you on a path to a later-developed comprehensive approach to brand and strategy.

I also believe that you can make certain assumptions about permies’ real brand while conducting a bit of informal research (maybe not empirical) to help inform you and your colleagues about what the real brand is. This fits into your “you have one week” model.

My amended counsel based on your understanding of yourself is that you find and empower a General Grant to your President Lincoln and you allow Grant to go win the war where other generals have failed while you stay in Washington, D.C., to focus on those things that your desires, inclinations, proclivities and pressures demand you to do.

And because I’ve punished the metaphor too much, your Grant would focus on this notion of brand determination and set forth a strategy to achieve the goals you desire for permies.

My best,
Dan

Along those lines: I would like to find a better name for the daily-ish email. I just feel it in my bones that there is a better name. Something a bit more fun. Something that says "world domination with permaculture"

paul wheaton wrote:Along those lines: I would like to find a better name for the daily-ish email. I just feel it in my bones that there is a better name. Something a bit more fun. Something that says "world domination with permaculture"

Dispatches from the Front!

Email name: A name concept could be a play on the idea that a root network is actually like an internet and the mycorrhizae fungi facilitate that communication. Would the Mycorrhizae Missive be too esoteric? I'm a sucker for alliteration.

The Daily Dose ..... fixing the permaculture jones we all have
Mycorrhizae Missive ..... explained above already
From the Headwaters ..... the idea of water (information) flowing to nourish growth elsewhere
Lighting Fires ..... the idea of igniting and inspiring positive change
Permaculture Perfusions ..... the idea of life-giving blood pumped from the source to the cells

Maybe these will cause others to brainstorm from here.

Hi Paul,

I'm an internet marketing guy. and typically when people hear of my affinaty to permaculture they are generally shocked as I spend most of my time online not building kick ass RMHs.... (sad I know).

Anyhoo the biggest thing we generally look at when we decide to pick up a new product is not the comission but rather the search volume via different marketplaces. So that being said If you gave a breakdown of the 1000 units that you sold that would be the best help as it would point to the viability of picking up the product(s).

If you could break that down into bitesize chuncks that would help, a quick note is that your "gut feeling" numbers are probably fine. so 50% from amazon? 40% from daily-ish email subscribers? and 10% from conference / youtube? That's the general Idea here. Also there are some folks who are AMAZON SEO's who can make your list be really high in amazon so you could create content to match the terms that have a high search volume rather than create an obsecure video that maybe applies to the few well educated permaculture folks. After all something as simple as a lawn care article has stopped how many train loads of gick being distributed.

So long story short:
1. give some metrics about where the sales came from
2. create a product that has permaculture benefits but has a high search volume

All the best,
Drew

Hi, Paul,
I'd like to help. I am developing a business, PermaculturEngineering, with the idea of bringing permaculture design into the engineering arena, particularly with respect to storm water management practices. I'm heading to the GLOBAL ASCE/EWB Conference in Panama this October. Perhaps there is a way I could do some marketing for you there? I think the Engineers Without Borders is a GREAT group to court, as they work all over the world. Got any thoughts on that?
DJ. WELLS, P.E.

The daily-ish emails to me are like sparks, reigniting our enthusiasm for Permaculture. Instead of daily-ish, you can call them Empire Sparks, or PermaSparks

Serendipitous timing. I am meeting later this month to assess and reinvigorate how The Home Grown Institute -which has up until now been (successfully) NW Philly oriented - moves forward with marketing permie ideals more widely. I will add this to our agenda and let you know what emerges.

Also, I have some feedback on the cards, but not sure this is the right thread for that...

I may not be a prolific money-making machine, but I found giving money via Patreon to people I like is very easy.

If you can net $100/$500/$1,000,000 every time you send out a podcast (a few days earlier for Patreon supporters, of course) and it's something you were going to put out anyway... Cha-ching!

Plus, Patreon is kinda like Kickstarter where people go there to find cool new stuff, which could mean exposure to people who don't know what permaculture is...

I say this because I ran across this today at the same time I was listening to your podcast... http://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=903215
... He's getting $600+ per month and that guy just wants to plant food on a river bank!

Former marketer-turned-butcher, chiming in...


You need to streamline and create trust. Brands are nothing but identifiable trust. Or as a former employer of mine once told me "A brand is a promise." That's why people like, and identify so much, with logos. It's quick and clean and you can recall it instantly. Your money is in your hand, you trust the logo, you buy the product (or service).

This shines light on an inherent and fundamental problem with 'marketing permaculture.' Trying to make people get on board with it isn't simply suggesting they buy a product or pay for a service. You're literally asking people to change the way they live. Now if someone has found Permies.com on their own (like yours truly) they've already committed to it. Maybe not in the sense of a bank account just yet, but they're on board. If you're researching chicken coops or how to grow tomatoes or homesteading; You have that gene that makes you want to know more about better ways to live. Living a better, simpler life is the draw to the 'product' of permaculture. The other side of the population just wants more reality TV and fast food. They won't be interested. You can't sell things of real value to people who don't value real things.

My point is, I think you need to key in on not so much 'marketing' but simply communication. You need someone to tap into the minds of people who are legitimately interested in their own actual lifestyle, not a psuedo lifestyle. Most companies simply market the idea of a lifestyle. They don't actually have anything to do with it. And if they do, it's nonsensical and intangible. Look at that shill of a company, RVCA. Clothes, they just make clothes with their logo. It's worth about 50 million dollars because some surfer brainwashed a bunch of teenagers. Permaculture and Permies.com are looking to LITERALLY change the world. That's not a tshirt, that's... that's something else entirely.

Permaculture isn't a product or a service, it's a matter of existence. It's so incredibly vast in it's depth and breadth it can be hard to digest all the avenues. I think you're best bet is to become something like "the epicenter of permaculture" by funneling all the info/sites/people/classes out there into one neat little package. People like small packages with big punch. You can focus revenue on ad dollars and specials run in conjunction with fellow permaculturalists. Film festivals, sponsor events and meetups, sell cook books and plans, etc.

Don't sell your idea of permaculture -- be the entire voice of it.

J Hampshire wrote:

My point is, I think you need to key in on not so much 'marketing' but simply communication. You need someone to tap into the minds of people who are legitimately interested in their own actual lifestyle, not a psuedo lifestyle. Most companies simply market the idea of a lifestyle. They don't actually have anything to do with it.

I'm glad that J has pointed this out. I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, and here is my long-winded take on it:

Permaculture, narrowly defined, is the practice of horticulture heavily dependent on perennial crops. Annuals have their place in permaculture, but more as a seasonal fill-in, and are never grown in large monocultures as is the practice in agriculture. Capitalism is an economic system, one that takes as one of its basic axioms the existence of markets with buyers and sellers. Being two entirely different things, one can't at first glance say whether they are compatible or not. We will have to go deeper and peel back the layers to see where they might support each other or come into conflict.

Capitalism comes in different varieties and has been practiced since the dawn of civilization, when the first towns were set up and people specialized in different areas of work like the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. In early societies, market day was held once a week and buyers and sellers from near and far could gather and exchange their surpluses for things they needed. Cash was not a necessity, and often easy-to-carry commodities substituted as a medium of exchange. In Colonial America, tobacco was often used as an exchange commodity, and a large denomination commodity was a bale of cotton.

The larger communities got, the easier it was to keep markets open with a steady flow of customers. Having the market open every day was a big improvement in some areas, as now it was possible to trade in perishable commodities like fresh fish. As markets grew, the capitalist system adapted, little by little, so that where you had stocks sold by open outcry on the curb at Wall Street in New York City in 1800, by 2008 stocks were sold by computer program without any human intervention. The capitalist system had changed more in those intervening years than the transportation system! While a cab can take you down Wall Street ten times faster than a horse and wagon, stock auctions that took a couple of minutes now take place in milliseconds.

The capitalism that is practiced in 21st century America is different in many ways from the earlier version. As technology has advanced, products are increasingly produced by specialized production methods; the Keebler elves have replaced Mom's oven. This has shifted the balance of buyer and seller so that now there is not an equal number, but a handful of producers are responsible for the majority of the market share going to millions of consumers.

Modern capitalism has also developed advertising to a high extent, using methods of psychological persuasion. It is less about the features of the product and more about creating and satisfying a want in the consumer. Coke and Pepsi and Royal Crown have long ago given up the blind taste test and now market their product through slogans and cultural tie-ins and developing brand loyalty. Thus has come the rise of 'marketing', the science of pitching a product or a service to a mass market, to levels where the sale to an individual consumer becomes insignificant. Marketing has little to do with explaining the benefits of a product to potential buyer and all to do with creating mass demand. The big successes of marketing are when demand can be created out of thin air, with no change in the product. The spike in sales of Reese's Pieces after the movie 'E.T.' came out is but one example.

It is the scale of this modern capitalism that puts it in opposition to the practice of permaculture. Permaculture is a local enterprise. It seeks to minimize trade and commerce, modern capitalism is just the opposite. Permaculture is part of a larger culture of sustainability, which encompasses local building methods, local production of energy through solar, wind and biomass, and local management of water resources. Where the capitalist looks around to see where the lowest cost of production is and adds in the cost of transportation, the permaculturist looks around to see what is available to meet the need. Local resources always take preference over items that have to be trucked in.

But it would be an error to say that the two systems are in opposition. Permaculture and capitalism coexist, but only in that overlap of the small, local market. It is there where a permaculturist with a surplus of vegetables can trade that surplus for soap or bread or pie that he would rather have. One thing he won't be trading for is external inputs such as chemical fertilizer or pesticide or herbicide to run his operation. The permaculturist knows that these products give a temporary boost to production, but it comes at the detriment of the long-term health of his soil and ecosystem.

Since permaculture only overlaps with the small-scale part of capitalism, it has no use for the inventions of megacapitalism, i.e., marketing. While you can use marketing to push any product or service, if that product or service is contradictory to the concept of marketing, the conflict readily becomes apparent to even the most casual observer. It's like the Revolutionary Communist Bookstore I saw in the '70s in a very liberal college town. I'm sure they had a copy of Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book", but if you were to follow that advice and profess this as your revolutionary act, the managers of the bookstore would turn decidedly un-Communist.

So if it is a contradiction to use mass marketing to push the idea of permaculture, what is left? How do you get the idea of living sustainably, growing your own food, building your own shelter, producing your own energy through to the mass of consumers conditioned to respond to marketing? The short answer is that you don't. You have to go around the megacapitalist model of creating demand for your product or service and then supplying that demand. Perhaps you use the strategies of social movements like the Civil Rights movement or the Marriage Equality movement to get your point across and get more people to adopt permaculture and sustainability.

Social movements confront behavior change directly, stating that our way is a better way to live your life, you should join us, or at least quit your active opposition to us. Mass marketing drags the mass of people along by responding to wants (termed 'demand' in the language of capitalism), never by stating the behavior change they would like to see. When cigarettes became recognized for the health hazard they are, mass marketers still wanted to sell them, so they came up with "healthier" cigarettes and advertised them as low-tar and low in nicotine. But the anti-smoking social movement had a much greater success in banning smoking in restaurants and the workspace and other public spaces so that now, despite the advertising budgets of tobacco capitalists, use of tobacco products continues to ebb.

What does it mean to advance permaculture through social movement than through marketing? It means organizing instead of advertising. Get more people to commit to be permaculturalists and spread the word instead of hitting the masses through advertising. Spend less dollars on crafting the message into a slogan or sound-bite and more on getting your face in front of people willing to listen to your message. Make it easy for people to start the permaculture lifestyle. Show them how they can go to the planter on the back stoop for their salad instead of the grocery store. Don't buy ad space on the salad bag that is sold in the store.

Social movements find themselves using advertisements, the tools of mass marketing, on occasion. But that is not their bread-and-butter. Admittedly, some of the decrease in smoking rates was due to the elimination of cigarette ads and the introduction of anti-smoking ads, but it had more to do with the newfound freedom of non-smokers to express their desire to breathe clean air, doctors reciting the litany of smoking related health problems, and the one-by-one conversion of public spaces to non smoking areas. And that one-by-one conversion didn't come by way of number of ads (marketing), but by way of number of individuals openly stating their views.

Permaculture has a long way to go to catch up with other social movements. But that is no reason not to start the climb. I find that the community of permaculturists is small and widely dispersed. I've sent and received seeds from far and wide, never from someone just down the road. When I talk to people about permaculture, there has to be an entry point. They aren't ready to take the whole living sustainably sermon in one sitting. But if they have a gardening question, that can open the door. If they are wondering how to cut their heating bill in the winter, that is another one. It is the challenge of the person who wants to spread the gospel of permaculture to find that entry point and recruit another convert.

For the daily-ish email name, simple and clear is good:

The Top Secret World Domination with Permaculture Newsletter

John
I liked and agree with your comment . Are you and Paul talking about the same thing here ?
You talking about spreading Permiculture and Paul about selling Permie stuff , I see these as different .

David

David Livingston wrote:John
I liked and agree with your comment . Are you and Paul talking about the same thing here ?
You talking about spreading Permiculture and Paul about selling Permie stuff , I see these as different .

David

Well, yes, they are different. Hence my anecdote about the bookstore selling Communist books via the capitalist business model. I'm sure that if you follow the capitalist business model and market Permie stuff, you can sell Permie stuff. But I think that falls short of getting people to adopt a sustainable permaculture lifestyle. That's what takes social movement type organizing.

After people learn about permaculture, likely through a marketing effort, and they begin to see all the benefits of a sustainable lifestyle, they will realize that they need to cut down on their participation in mass capitalism. In effect, the success of the mass-marketed permaculture message to them will be to disregard all future mass-marketed messages.

On a side note, I'd like to point out that Permaculture and Permies is really just a subset of Sustainability. And I too, like the sound of Permies better than the sound of "Sustainies". I don't mind using permaculture and sustainability interchangeably, but whatever you call it, the more of it you practice, the less need you have for the products of mass-capitalism. Paul's predicament at the moment is that you have to use the methods of mass-capitalism to get the message out that there is an alternative to mass-capitalism.

John Elliott wrote:On a side note, I'd like to point out that Permaculture and Permies is really just a subset of Sustainability. And I too, like the sound of Permies better than the sound of "Sustainies".

This sounds like some sort of adult diaper.

I don't know of any easy way to do this, but I'd try and analyse the flow of traffic from various sites, look at it the way you'd look at a roadmap and figure out where most of the traffic is coming from, where it's headed, plug the leaks where people leave the empire, and try to divert traffic from heavily visited pages to relevant sales pages. Look at traffic coming from 3rd party sites like FB, twitter, youtube, etc. For heavy content creation, try to syndicate it all over the web. The internet has changed since 2009, seems to have moved away from RSS, but nothing seems to have replaced it. However, for video content, you can syndicate it using services like trafficgeyser or tubemogul which puts the video out on several video hosting sites at once. This might dilute stats like viewcount, but the brilliance of it is if you put a link in the description of the video, you've got instant backlinks from dozens of high PR video sites.

You do already have a huge following with the people on permies. I don't know how, but it could be possible to convince some of them to support you more. But I know that you are about spreading the empire, and so some other ideas would be to get the word out in other forms of media such as magazines or newspaper. You could start with the local paper, and permaculture magazine. But don't stop there. What about marketing in traditional gardening magazines, or even marketing on garden web. Now that would be a difficult one, but with the right approach I think that you could effectively market to the people at garden web.

This website was posted in another thread.

http://www.skillshare.com/classes/business/Succeeding-on-Kickstarter/2087872081?via=browse

They have classes on kickstarters and marketing that might be interesting?

Sign me up! I'd love to write some articles/ reviews on your products with an affiliate link. I'm not a marking genius but I think if I keep the pace I'm on in about 3-6 months I will be. I'm really curious about the status of the earthworks dvd. When is it coming out? I'd love to get my hands on that!

Chad Sentman wrote:

John Elliott wrote:On a side note, I'd like to point out that Permaculture and Permies is really just a subset of Sustainability.  And I too, like the sound of Permies better than the sound of "Sustainies".

This sounds like some sort of adult diaper.

I was just re-reading this thread, not knowing that I had previously commented on it.  When I came across John's post, I had the same thought as I had back then, and was delighted to discover my own reply. It really does sound like the name of an adult diaper.

What brought me here is, I'm trying to find anywhere that Paul mentions an affiliate commission for people who promoted his kickstarter campaigns. If people could document that they posted a link to the campaign and that link drove X traffic or resulted in Y pledges, Paul would pay Z% to the person who posted the backlink.

Can anyone fill in the blanks?

On my last kickstarter, I paid a 20% kickback.  

Kickstarter would generate a tracking link, and it allows you to associate a name with the link.  So then you look at the report that shows where the money is coming from, you can see who did what.  

Is there a central thread on promoting Paul's work and Kickstarter. I am retired and I have lots of time to try to help Paul get his work out there. I have a fairly good grasp of social media and think I could help.
I just signed up to be an affiliate but I also wondered if there are any remote positions available. I could easily commit to up to eight hours a day to helping further his "devious plots". But I am not able to go to Montana to help.

Vicki Stoegbauer wrote:Is there a central thread on promoting Paul's work and Kickstarter. I am retired and I have lots of time to try to help Paul get his work out there. I have a fairly good grasp of social media and think I could help.
I just signed up to be an affiliate but I also wondered if there are any remote positions available. I could easily commit to up to eight hours a day to helping further his "devious plots". But I am not able to go to Montana to help.

Vicki,

If you bring in more income than i would spend to have you as an assistant, then i would be glad to bring you in full time.  And you don't need to come to montana.  

As for kickstarters:   I have two projects I am currently working on.   One of which we hope to have set up on kickstarter in less than a month.  The second would be in august.  

In the meantime, josiah has given me an enormous amount of his time to improve the conversion rate for our existing products.  The first project he has taken on is this one:

https://www.permaculture-design-course.com/

In order to test aspects of it, there are a few things we are still working on.   But I think it will do affiliate stuff - maybe josiah can answer those questions.  I do know that an earlier version did do affiliate program stuff.  

The page is new, and to test it, we need to get traffic to it.  

There was a person that was working full time to help with the 2018 PDC, ATC and PPDC.  She was also going to rent structures and stuff here.  And set up new events.   She flaked out.   So I have been trying to put effort into selling tickets, and I am struggling to find the time to get the word out.  So that is something where we could use a lot of help.   I've been offering a 30% kickback for ticket sales.

The "to do" list is quite massive.  I think I could keep 100 remote people busy for 100 hours per week.   And after a year I could probably triple that.  

A couple of hours ago we added a link to the bottom of all the pages that says "affiliate" - so tuck right in and make massive income for you and for me.  That would be a big start!  

Thank you! Very much for taking the time to respond. I know you are very busy trying to make a difference. I watch people get caught up in shit  they can't do anything about and I get so frustrated. I had already moved away from Facebook because of the constant fighting. I am currently working on my signature and I'm listening to more podcasts.I am at a little over 100 so far.I hadn't been doing a very good job of tracking my episodes because I had thought that I couldn't help you since I couldn't get out to Montana. But as I see your frustrations rise with people I think it's time for me to stop fucking around and do something to help.

Paul Wheaton wrote:In the meantime, josiah has given me an enormous amount of his time to improve the conversion rate for our existing products.  The first project he has taken on is this one:

https://www.permaculture-design-course.com/

Don't mean to distract from the conversation but I wanted to say that you and Josiah have done a great job with that page. I really like it and I hope it goes great!

Just a little bug I noticed when viewing it through my phone... the top image is cut off and everything seems pushed to the left side with blank space along the right. I did not notice that on the desktop view.

Exciting about the new kickstarters. I heard you mention that a bit on your podcast. I'm not sure if my site will be up in time to help with the first but I will be able to help promote the one in August! Can't wait to find out what the projects are!

Also, I sent an email to gir about some stuff.

I feel like there are about 100 million people currently getting paid working full time for a non-profit.   And getting well paid.   If they were not paid, they would not do it.  

As I explore the idea of "why isn't permaculture a household word?" it occurs to be that there is not a giant permaculture non-profit with 5000 paid employees working to get permaculture to be a household word.  

We currently have about 40 people active on the permies.com staff as volunteers.  They are willing to do a LOT for permaculture.  And they do a lot.  They do stuff that they are comfortable with and when the time comes, they will do the occasional dirty task (delete a nasty post, or ban a spammer).   But for tasks that will take two weeks of 8 hours a day ....   not what they are into.  And that's cool.  

So if we are going to grow there needs to be paid people.  To have paid people, there needs to be cash flow.  And I'm spread way too thin.  

Fortunately, we have products and affiliate programs.  So now, people can pay themselves and the empire gets coin too.  If enough people do it, we will have enough money to pay people to do all the things that need to be done.  

With your 8 hours a day, there is a LOT that will be accomplished.  So, yes, please help.   And, fill your pockets with coin along the way.  

Josiah, if Vicki wants to make an affiliate link to your new page, how does she go about doing that?

Daron Williams wrote:Also, I sent an email to gir about some stuff.

A HUGE shout out to Craig, Julia, Raven, Devaka and several others on the permies.com staff that worked huge hours to get the email river under control.  We are now all caught up and, hopefully, keeping up on it daily.  Hopefully even every couple of hours.  We now have gir bot managing a lot of the emails that come through the river.

I have been at it for about four hours today and I agree there is so much to do but I belong to a community of nomads that is comprised of mostly people not really sure what they want to do with their lives.

I have been floundering myself at what my role in this can be and I listened to your passive income streams podcasts and I listened to you talk about all of the articles you have done over the last 12 years.

Even though I homesteaded  and spent oodles of time fucking off online I can't remember seeing that many of them.
I totally see Josiah's point of how to generate my own income by posting articles etc online and generating traffic to them it seems like reinventing the wheel.

So many young people are hitting the roads with their cameras and their YouTube channel saving to buy some land and start farming/homesteading. Seems like your cost of land would be enough to get people up there. Let's just see how much we can get done.
You have already done the hard work. Now just trying to get it out there. I am working on how to drive more interest in getting people involved in promoting permaculture. And maybe reaching more people is the answer.

Don't mean to distract from the conversation but I wanted to say that you and Josiah have done a great job with that page. I really like it and I hope it goes great!

Thank you very much.

Just a little bug I noticed when viewing it through my phone... the top image is cut off and everything seems pushed to the left side with blank space along the right. I did not notice that on the desktop view.

I believe that has been resolved, although I have only been able to test it on 2 mobile devices. Please let me know if there is still an issue. I hope to have a graphic for mobile soon to add to the top of the page.

paul wheaton wrote:Josiah, if Vicki wants to make an affiliate link to your new page, how does she go about doing that?

The way affiliates work with the new landing pages is by adding your f-code by appending ?f= parameter to the page URL.

Example:

https://permaculture-design-course.com?f=7
or
https://pdcvid.com?f=7

Dan Grubbs you primed the pump.
A few thoughts.
Premium Perrmaculture News
Permaculture Planet News
Permaculture People News
Permaculture World Wizards
Permaculture News
Planet Permaculture News
Prepping Permaculture News
Permaculture Pioneer News

Great content on Permies.
Key words  permaculture News in name send a clear message.