The Ungrateful Bastards!

I am going to tell you my dirty little secret…

I don’t like public speaking!

If I get in the right frame of mind (alcohol helps) then I can be really good at it, but 99.99% of the time, I suck at it.

So when you are terrible at something you have two choices: avoid it, or practice it.

I chose to avoid it. But guess what, all that is about to change!

Or so I thought…

Here is what happened…

I realised that I had to do some public speaking and some public mentoring. People have been bugging me to do buzz marketing seminars in the UK and America. But I felt that if I charged someone for my time, then it would be a little unfair, as essentially it would just be practice for me.

When you are under pressure to do something scary, the last thing you want to do is charge someone $4k+ to experience it with you.

So I came up with the ingenious plan of finding a group of people in Madrid who may be interested in making truck loads of cash online, and then I planned to meet them in Madrid, do a talk, perhaps a presentation etc… who knows, maybe I could do it once per month.

(cue sad violin music) I felt good about the idea, it would be my little way of giving something back to the community, sharing my knowledge, and also gaining some more experience in public speaking. I wouldn’t charge them $4k+ per head, in fact, I wouldn’t charge them a single dime. It would be 100% gratis.

So I went to a local Madrid forum, and posted my offer on the forum. Bear in mind I have over 150 posts at this forum, so there is no way they would think I was spamming.

Or at least that is what I thought.

I got a message from the owner 10 mins later saying he had complaints from people who thought it was a sales pitch.

It seems you can’t give stuff away these days.

The Ungrateful Bastards!

So anyway, once my battered pride had healed, I realised that there is a valuable lesson that we can all take from this experience. Actually there could be a few:

1) People are ungrateful bastards

2) I didn’t relate to my audience. Pitching a marketing based idea to a community of mainly teachers is not a great idea.

3) I should have given a perceived value. You see, when people see something is for free, they often think it is because it is worthless.

4) People are ungrateful bastards

5) Some people are happy where they are, they don’t want to change.

6) Not everyone wants to make money online. Yes, it is true.

7) People are ungrateful bastards

8 ) I should have given them a sense of authority. Perhaps shown them that I am number one and two in Google for BUZZ MARKETING GURU or something. But to be honest, I didn’t want to gloat.

9) Last, but not least… all together now… people are ungrateful bastards!

Thanks for indulging me in my rant.

Actually, people are not generally ungratefulbastards, it was 100% my fault! My pitch was flawed. It just goes to show that you have to be in a copywriting mindset even when you don’t think any is required.

Also, just because I thought that offer was too good to be true, doesn’t mean that anyone else should.

So with that in mind, if anyone wants to come to Madrid, I will be happy to spend some time discussing buzz marketing for your company. Who knows, I may even stand up and do some public speaking.

Dean