Here's a story from 2009 that's still as important today: Beth Kanter is a force to be reckoned with in the technology not-for-profit space. She is a passionate, energetic woman who seems to be forever in motion. One night, at a Boston-based tech gathering, Kanter mentioned her latest project to Chris: “I'm working on sending a Cambodian woman to college. Today, I raised $500 toward my goal of $1,000, and I was wondering if you could help me get the other half tomorrow.” Chris said yes. It's not easy to say no to Kanter. She supports the best causes.

Chris decided to ask the community on Twitter to support the cause. He tweeted a message that read, “Spend $10 and send a woman to college,” with a link to Beth's blog post, which had a simple widget that would let one send money. Subsequent messages on Twitter said, “For the price of two lattes, you can send a woman to college today.” Chris asked that his followers on Twitter retweet, to help spread the message, along with the link. This request turned the message viral, as other people on Twitter with different followers sent the request out into their communities.

Using these simple techniques, the additional $500 was raised on Twitter in less than two hours.

Kanter explains, “My first campaign took three weeks of blogging, emailing, and IMing people I had a connection with. After that I did two other campaigns, and because I built relationships with the donors of the first campaign, they donated again and asked their friends as well.” If you construct your request to illustrate a compelling outcome, have a specific call to action (e.g., “Give me ten bucks”), and build your community organically, then you will probably be successful.

When this story was first written, Chris had several thousand followers on Twitter (and it's 340,000 now), so the results will be different depending on your reach. But the premise and the method still hold true: Online communities are valuable. They can be reached more quickly and leveraged more effectively than offline communities, and the right kind of trust agent can work with online communities to effect actionable change. Understanding how online communities work can help you leverage them for good causes or for business value. The tools available now are better than ever.

What Is the Archimedes Effect?

Why do we use power tools when a good saw and hammer will do the job? Why do we ride bicycles instead of walking? If we're happy with the way things are, why do we seek something new? For most of us, the reason we use new tools is because they will produce results faster or more effectively. We seek the same benefits in all our activities.

Do you want more customers? Do you want to take what you have and turn it into something more? That's where we get closer to what this chapter is about.

Technology is taken for granted every day. Instruments such as the bicycle are so common that they are barely seen as technology at all. In reality, we use bicycles or cars to get around because they're faster, and we use power tools because they will help us build a stronger house. Yet when people connect with the web to do their business, they often ignore tools that, again and again, have helped others get ahead. Trust agents understand this and strive to learn how the web can make things happen: more, faster, bigger, whatever needle needs moving.

Archimedes of Syracuse was a famous Greek inventor from the third century B.C.E. He's the one who said, “Eureka!” He also said, “With a lever large enough, I can move the world.” The Archimedes Effect is about leverage: putting in a certain amount of effort and getting a greater result than our normal human effort would give. Everyone uses leverage every day: Business owners hire employees so that their business can do more; people use cars to help them get to work faster; companies have systems that allow them to be more efficient. Yet millions use the web every day and ignore how best to use the tools at their disposal to bring the greatest benefit.

There's a programmer's saying that “the lazy ones are usually the best.” It may seem counterintuitive, but it's true. Programmers want a little bit of code to do a lot of work, so lazy programmers usually do the most thinking and the least writing. They maximize their time by having the code they write do all the heavy lifting, and the best ones do it even more effectively than the rest, picking up code here and there, then combining it with very powerful results. Result: lots of power from a lot less work.

A Basic View of Leverage

The simplest way to understand leveraging the web is this: You can use the advantage you have in one place to help you in another, using something you have easy access to that others don't. Like the programmers, you can use what you have a lot of (in their case, brains) to achieve more, and you can do it more easily.

Apple used its market dominance with the iPod as a springboard to the creation of the iPhone. Can you remember any other phone device launch that had so much press coverage? Can you remember mile-long lines and sellouts for any other phone in the history of mobile devices? Leverage means taking what works and moving the value into something else that's different (yet connected) to the previous idea.

Kevin Rose leveraged his success with the popular social news site Digg into the opportunity to make an online video platform, Revision3. He used the leverage he gained from those two successes to make a messaging platform, Pownce. Although he was no match for Twitter, the competition he was after, it went a lot better than it would have if he had started from nothing. Because he and his team had his previous successes and the reputation associated with them, the platform had a bit of an opportunity to develop. Viewing all three products in sum—a social news site, a video media platform, and a communications platform—you might be able to see future opportunities that Rose could leverage as well.

Celebrities use leverage all the time. Robert Downey Jr. staged one of the biggest comebacks in entertainment history with his role as Tony Stark in the 2008 hit Iron Man, which took in $98 million dollars on its opening weekend and exceeded half a billion dollars in ticket sales in a few months. He went right from that film to the reasonably successful Tropic Thunder, then to The Soloist, and on to Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. Downey's success in one film can be leveraged to land a role in another, which shows his consistent star power, which in turn allows him even further leverage. He withdraws some equity from the roles he's successfully completed and utilizes it in future products.

Understanding leverage and how to use it is one of the trickier parts of being a trust agent. This might be the least familiar part of what some of you know how to do. Yet for others, this is a huge “Well, duh!” chapter. Chris, for instance, is less skilled in applying leverage than Julien. He compensates with other trust agent skills, but certainly looks for ways to improve his understanding and application of leverage.

An Introduction to Arbitrage

Another example of leverage is arbitrage, something used across the web most famously by pay-per-click (PPC) specialists in the early days of search advertising. It works like this: You buy something somewhere at one price, then sell it somewhere else at a higher price. PPC marketers did this with clicks, buying traffic at one price and selling it at another.

To explain this further, imagine that a company comes to you and says, “I have to get more people to buy my rain gutter replacement system.” You can sell it the old-fashioned way—by taking out advertisements, by dialing numbers from the phone book, by posting a website with a big fat “Buy now” button—or you can take advantage of search engine marketing.

Build a website with all kinds of useful information on rain gutter replacement systems. Have plenty of links for people to click to purchase such a system. Does that magically make people come there when they want a rain gutter replacement system? No.

The solution is to buy search traffic from Google, which sells certain search terms for certain dollar amounts, such that when people are searching Google (or any site where Google AdSense ads are placed) and click a link, you (the person who bought the search traffic and paid money for the ads) pay a certain amount. For example, if you make $30 every time you sign up a customer seeking rain gutter replacement, and it costs you $10 worth of search traffic advertising to get those links, you make $20 for every successful procedure. Voilà: You have arbitrage as a leverage system as it pertains to basic e-commerce.

A Young Man's Primer

When Julien was young, he had what he thought was a brilliant idea (young people often think they're smarter than they really are). The way he saw it, the most powerful currency in the world was the British pound, so he would move to England, work there, gather a bit of savings, and then move to India and live like a prince. It seemed to make a lot of sense; save one kind of currency that's common to the British, then trade it somewhere else where it's worth a lot more. Turns out, this is kind of what currency traders do, and it's kind of what George Soros famously did when he broke the Bank of England by shorting the pound in 1992, for an eventual profit of $2 billion. (We now realize we're in the wrong line of work.)

The principle of arbitrage is the same everywhere, and while it's widely used for trade and currency, the concept can be applied elsewhere as well. Arbitrage is using something that is less valuable to one person and benefiting from its greater value to someone else. When Julien's show was on Sirius satellite radio, it wasn't that big a deal to him, but it had the effect that most people in traditional media did take him a lot more seriously. As a consequence, he was using something that, to him, was not particularly valuable to help him gain entrance to some places where he really did want to be.

To understand leverage, it helps to hear about what Jane McGonigal, award-winning game designer, calls multicapitalism, or the ability to understand multiple, varying forms of value and to know how to exchange one type of capital freely for another. Advantages are gained from having various types of capital, such as stocks (or favors), because many people do not understand them very clearly. The reason an exporter from Morocco is able to make money in the United States is because very few people go to Morocco or know how to speak the language and because the exporter isn't competing with, say, Mickey Mouse dolls, which anyone has access to and can sell.

The issue of reduced competition is extremely beneficial when it comes to leverage: Under such circumstances, profits can increase massively. Julian Dibbell, Wired contributor and game enthusiast, was able to take advantage of this kind of leverage in the game world, trading virtual, online goods in a massive-multiplayer online (MMO) game known as Ultima Online, eventually becoming the second most successful trader in the game, resulting in thousands of dollars of profit. He was able to do this because almost no one knew how to make a living this way, which reduced competition and made the job easier.

Whether you're leveraging a virtual, in-game economy (see the following sidebars) or leveraging attention on your blog to help with another project, the point is the same. Leveraging technology, information, or anything else will increase the value of what you do many times over.

The Path of Least Resistance

While we're on the subject of reduced competition, using the web to network and make connections may be the easiest thing you've ever done. This means connecting on a personal level rather than a business one, meaning that neither party wants anything from the other. (See Chapter 3, “One of Us” for more about this.) In a way, the web is the equivalent of chatting in a bar, though it's the largest bar in the world, where superficial connection with almost anyone is possible. In that environment, we get to have an initial relationship, but it can be used as a foundation to build on later. The easiest way to build on that relationship is in person.

Meeting someone in person with whom you've already connected on the web is more effective, because you get all the signals of a real relationship, including nonverbal cues (facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.). And after connecting on the web, meeting people in person can be like meeting old friends; you get to catch up on all the stuff you don't know about them.

Whatever your industry, it is important to meet a lot of people online, if only superficially. You can do this by connecting with them through tools like Facebook and Twitter or by commenting on their social media wherever it may be. Then find ways to meet face-to-face—whether at industry conferences or in one-on-one meetings—to cement those relationships. By doing so, you make yourself more “real” than the competition (i.e., the people who aren't there in person) and give yourself an advantage. It's easier to own the game.

Owning the Largest Game in the World

Google brought a whole new level of search accuracy to the Internet when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created a system based on the powerful algorithm PageRank. This system indexed the web with a far more effective form of measuring website relevance than before. Ten years later, the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Google is “search.” The company's name has even slipped into everyday use as a verb: “Could you Google the store's address for me?” Of course, Google was a $125 billion market cap company in 2009, and grew into a $970 billion value in 2020; in fact, it barely had a business model.

But if you think of Google as only a search company, you're missing one of the biggest and best examples of leveraging technology. Google took its advanced ability to know what people wanted to find and paired that with advertising, building the best contextual advertising placement that the web had ever seen. Now, billions of dollars are pouring into Google for a platform that it has paired with several of its other offerings, adding more and more value to the company's leverage effort.

Tools like Google give us another example of what leveraging resources can do for us. Take one opportunity, grow it into something of quality, and then leverage that opportunity into a new one that provides even more value. See where this could be useful for you as a trust agent? Leverage is part of what drives the more successful people on the web.

Want another example? Kevin Ham, a devout Christian from Vancouver, tagged as “the man who owns the Internet” by Business 2.0 magazine, owns hundreds of thousands of domain names, including God.com and Satan.com. But it was his agreement with the government of Cameroon that marked him as the domain owner to watch. By recognizing that many people mistyped domain names into the address bar, he was able to make one of the greatest deals in the history of the web. You see, every time you mistype .com as .cm, you are asking for a web address in Cameroon. Ham made a big deal with the government there, so now, whenever someone mistypes .com as .cm and that address is unregistered (e.g., Live.cm, Microsoft's search engine, is registered and points to Live.com, but chrisbrogan.cm isn't), it redirects that person to one of Ham's websites. This one massive move created millions of additional views to Ham's sites, and as with Google, it's all a matter of leveraging infrastructures that are already in place.

Existing Infrastructure

Very few people build wells in their backyards anymore, because we all have running water in our homes. We take public transit because it makes our commutes easier, helping us get to our jobs so we can earn money, so we can pay our rent, so we can keep the wheels of society moving around and around. Infrastructure exists everywhere in the modern world because it's a time saver, letting us focus on the things we're best at for as long as possible. When we're using our time to best advantage, we're better serving ourselves and our families and communities. As a result, everyone benefits.

Somehow, the connection made with infrastructure in our everyday world remains lost on most people who use the web. While we do see both email and Google as utilities, for the most part we don't see the infrastructure that's present there, and thus we don't see how it can grease the wheels of our vehicle, helping us get where we want to go. Some people do see it, and they're the ones who are quickest to get rich, whether in either social capital, financial capital, or (sometimes) both. Those who leverage work that other people have done (after all, Google was built by people) are able to profit mostly because they're not busy reinventing the wheel. For the most part, these people are business owners. To think like a business owner is to see opportunity everywhere, just waiting for you to show up and grab it.

How a Trust Agent Uses Time

Once you learn how to better leverage time, you free yourself to do the work that's most important. If we haven't made it abundantly clear, this isn't the easy route to success. (We know there's no easy route, right?) As a trust agent, finding the time to apply the human touch to thousands of people in your network (provided you've done your Agent Zero work well) is important. To do this you must learn how to leverage your time.

Some of the simpler ways require a great deal of discipline and sometimes some negotiation. For instance, how long is your commute to the office? Is that time something that could be leveraged more effectively elsewhere? Are you willing to make that proposal to your boss? As we said before, Chris's commute in 2008 was 67 miles one way, which (with traffic) amounted to almost four hours in the car every day. Shifting that one variable into more keyboard time meant that both Chris and his company were happier with the results.

Can you find ways to save time and then leverage that savings elsewhere? Absolutely. There are plenty of ways.

Protecting Your Community as a Leverage Point

Here is a rule of thumb that works really well when it comes to leveraging your relationship with your audience: Don't ever sell to your audience. Instead, be their gatekeeper.

Think of Oprah Winfrey. She gives and gives, constantly, and leverages that goodwill into bigger and bigger guests and giveaways. But does she ever try to sell her audience directly? No, Winfrey leverages her audience to provide visibility: to stars, to movies, to car companies. She protects her audience by guarding them from the bad stuff, and she lets the good stuff pass through, making her audience even happier as a result. (See Figure 4.1.)

Building any kind of following online is difficult enough. It requires solid leadership skills, the ability to create a sense of belonging, a gracious attitude, transparency about who you are, and empowering the community to feel important. It gets a lot harder when, to participate in a community, members are asked for money to sustain your business. In fact, it is practically impossible to foster a sense of community under these circumstances unless your channel is already very financially motivated (the “make money online” bloggers come to mind).

Celebrities use the Oprah Winfrey method regularly on Oscar night, using their visibility to obtain the most expensive and beautiful designer clothes in the world. They don't pay for them. The designers know that their names will be all over the tabloids and television the next day, so they give Oscar attendees their best stuff for free, and celebrities leverage the attention to benefit.

Jeff Pulver, one of the pioneers of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) industry, also did this well when he ran the VON conferences. He charged a great deal of money for people to attend the event, because corporations would pay for their employees to attend, knowing that those attendees would learn from true visionaries and future thinkers and that this information would invigorate their disrupted industry. The employees themselves never paid to attend. Pulver would then turn around and spend a good portion of the money he collected to provide the attendees a memorable time, including flying in rock bands like the Counting Crows to play at open-bar events, where Pulver did his best to dance with all 2,000 attendees.

Pulver would then charge exhibitors tens of thousands of dollars so they could gain access to his beloved community. They paid because Pulver attracted the brightest minds in communications technologies to the events. The exhibitors considered this part of their marketing budget. The corporations paid for the attendees. Pulver paid for the fun. The people who didn't have to pay at all? The heart and soul of the community. This ecosystem lasted for more than a decade and served everyone's business needs rather well.

Daniel Palestrant runs what is probably the most profitable online professional network you've never heard about. Sermo.com is a network for medical professionals. It's exclusive. You need to demonstrate your credentials to become a member, but once you're inside, you gain business relationships with the brightest minds in medicine and surgical arts.

Palestrant charges media and investment types a fee to access his community, ask questions, or seek professional endorsement opportunities. The community at large opts in for this kind of matchmaking, and they get financial benefits from their interactions with the paid professionals. Here again, there's a professional ecosystem that treats the audience or community as the most important asset and requires a fee from those who want access to it.

This is a winning formula for certain types of trust agents. Are you one of them? Make sure that you are, because this kind of strategy can be a lot of work.

It's not that you have to be busy and occupied at every moment. That's not what time leverage is about. Rather, the goal is to use time to your advantage and use it better when you need.

Speaking of that, here's another way to work on leverage.

How a Trust Agent Leverages Social Media

Social media platforms (blogging, podcasting, video, and using social networks like Facebook, Twitter) provide opportunities for people to leverage communication media to benefit their organizations. First and foremost, reaching out to people via blogging is a one-to-many opportunity. Instead of sending a single email or placing a phone call, having someone like Lionel Menchaca from Dell writing about service issues on the Direct2Dell blog is a way to stretch the value of that message so that it resonates with more people.

Being Frank Eliason and using Twitter to respond to people via @comcastcares means leveraging the medium to achieve many positive outcomes: It lowers repeat calls to customer service; it reduces escalation issues within the care department; and it provides outward signs that the company is doing something with the customer's complaint.

The reason Eliason was able to achieve all this is because he leverages massive social networks that let him know when people are talking about his company. Without real-time assessments of what conversations are happening, and where, do you think it would be possible to reach them fast enough to put out the fires? With all of the resources available today, not using them is a lot like not using a phone to call a fire station. Shouldn't you be using that phone?

Doing more with what is available to you in this case means sending out responses and having steady community interaction by using the open-faced interactions of the web to build two-way relationships and conversations instead of using the old, one-at-a-time methods from other means of communication. You can see how this might apply to your business, too.

Fish Where the Fish Are

Another point to consider: If you're not taking advantage of the way the web connects everyone, including your potential customers, you're missing the easy opportunities. Have you checked out Woot (www.woot.com)? Matt Rutledge built a site where people rush to buy a single discounted item a day and where hundreds more level their reviews, commentary, and more for every product put up there. The reviews are often harsh, yet sellers are seeing the benefits. Inc. magazine reported in a September 2008 article that Rutledge reported a three-year growth of 4,998 percent. How? By taking advantage of the technology of the web that allows for two-way conversations, for peer review, and for an entertainment-like experience built into the shopping.

Dell has created an entire ad campaign by promoting its sales and discounts via Twitter (www.dell.com/twitter). It provides sales for zero dollars of effort, meaning that the ROI on leveraging this medium is pretty darned good.

The web has made building relationships an inexpensive (and often free) proposition, and that part is good. The reason for trust agents, however, is that this is an opt-in world, and your buyer has more control over your attempts to sell than ever before. Tuning out is just as easy and free as your attempts to bring a message across these new channels.

That said, there are benefits to using the web as a tool to reach more people.

About Recommendation

One of the reasons the web's commercial citizens tend to provide free stuff for people is that they are leveraging the huge potential audience for any product or service, along with their idea's ability to be widely spread at little to no cost. Whether it's free blog content, a “freemium” service that asks you to pay if you want more features, or anything in between, the web's ability to reach thousands of people is pretty much unparalleled—if you know how.

Leveraging the social web's ability to widely disseminate ideas through recommendation engines like Reddit, Twitter, and others helps you communicate your ideas to hundreds of people without using a megaphone. Instead, you can quietly say what you have to say and let your audience spread your message for you. This allows you to focus on creating more content, creating more deals, and forging more partnerships. In fact, the more you can get other people to relay your ideas, the better. This recommendation is a great tool to employ.

Creating content that will receive a recommendation is difficult, and here's where most companies go wrong: They don't think creatively about how their content can be exciting to the average population. This is a common problem; if you've been in your industry for a while, it's probably pretty boring to you unless you just developed something revolutionary.

The trick is to come up with something you could tell people at a party, something that would differentiate what you think is interesting about what you do and what the average person thinks is interesting.

Things to Stop and Things to Start

If you're busy trying to reinvent the wheel because it makes you happy and you enjoy solving problems, that's fine. But if you're like most of us and just want to get to the good stuff, work to make a better product, or whatever, here's some common sense advice about where to spend your time.

Summing Up the Stops and Starts

Whatever industry you're in, leverage your position in your space. The opportunity is there, and once you get used to it, you'll see it everywhere. The key lesson here is to spend your time doing what you and your company do best and delegating everything else that you can. This is true because it's not profitable to do everything yourself and because, let's be honest, you're not that great at all those other tasks, are you?

Using Leverage to Build Dad-O-Matic

Chris has a very active and passionate community at www.chrisbrogan.com. One day, he decided that he wanted to put together a blog about being a dad, but because Chris loves collaborative projects, he wanted to do more than just make a blog about how he acts as a dad. He wanted a group blog, where dads (most of them with their own blogs) would also contribute the occasional post about parenting from a dad's perspective. That's how http://dadomatic.com was born.

In less than 30 days, Chris had a blog with more than 50 authors, each passionate about the idea of writing about parenting. Guest contributors included famous evangelist and venture investor Guy Kawasaki, top blogger Darren Rowse from ProBlogger (www.problogger.net), and several dozen passionate dads from all walks of life. The site was instantly stocked with great writers.

The success of Dad-O-Matic all stems from how Chris leveraged his popular site, www.chrisbrogan.com, and his presence on Twitter to reach out to dads interested in being part of a group project with him. None of the dads had any financial reason to join the project, and none were actively seeking more writing gigs. They joined in because they knew that having a relationship with Chris would be fun and rewarding and that the project would be successful. Now the project is roaring along, and people are reaching out to the dads of Dad-O-Matic to review products, give opinions, and generally share a dad's perspective—and it all came from moving energy from one successful project to another. Others are also linking to the site from all over the web, which is giving it a boost in traffic and search engines normally gained only by older and more established sites. That's the power of leveraging a community toward a goal.

Leverage and the Third Tribe

In 2010, Chris launched a new side project with Brian Clark of www.copyblogger.com, Darren Rowse of www.problogger.net, and Sonia Simone of Remarkable-Communication.com called Third Tribe Marketing (http://www.thirdtribemarketing.com). It is a private online community dedicated to sharing their secrets of online marketing with others interested in that pursuit. The term “third tribe” was meant to represent a new group that resided somewhere between the “yellow highlighter” (hard-sell) online marketers and the “social media cool kids” who consider all business suspect and all marketing evil.

In a way, it's quite a coup of leverage.

For whatever reason, any time Chris mixes a moneymaking business with his free and open chrisbrogan.com, sparks fly. People normally raise a cry, declare Chris a sellout, and proclaim all his efforts to be money-hungry and inauthentic. Only this time, that didn't happen.

When Chris and the others launched the site, nothing particularly loud or negative happened. What changed? Quite honestly, by learning more about leverage from Julien in the hardcover edition of Trust Agents, and through increased experience in dealing with people, Chris learned the appropriate way to introduce the new project—and to avoid alienating his free audience. Here's what he did:

• He introduced the Third Tribe project clearly and with an explanation of what it was and wasn't.
• He utilized his relationship with well-respected colleagues, Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, and Sonia Simone to reinforce the benefit of the project.
• He explained the pricing model of the project ($47 a month) clearly and without any teeth gnashing over the value one would receive for that money.
• He reinforced that he'd still offer plenty for free at www.chrisbrogan.com, that the Third Tribe wasn't for everyone, and that he'd still deliver just as much content and value at www.chrisbrogan.com.

Chris thinks he used the Archimedes Effect best in the second and fourth items. Because Chris could cite two top-shelf websites (and a good friend) as associates of the project, people felt that they understood what kind of community it was. Because Chris made it clear that people didn't have to visit the Third Tribe to derive some value, people didn't feel offended or cheated or in any other way treated poorly.

The site is alive and well and functioning as both a great community for sharing secrets of online marketing and a nice source of side revenue for Chris's efforts. One last note about leverage: The site also means that Chris gets a little more revenue from non-face-to-face events; because there are only so many airplanes and so many stages in the world, Chris had to find some ways to use the Internet to deliver his message.

Yes, we most certainly take our own medicine here.

Wait, It Sounds Like You're Saying…

Yes, we are saying that the whole web is one gigantic lever, and you can use it to accomplish pretty much anything more easily than before. That's because the web is, by definition, technology, and using technology for leverage is one of the most fundamental ways we humans are where we are today. Most people wait for technology to become common before they start taking advantage of it, but you should stop doing this. Becoming an early adopter of technology sometimes means paying more, or putting effort into understanding a certain tool before there's a manual for it, but it also means you're there at the beginning, which leaves you in a better position than others when the technology becomes common. It even connects you with more business opportunities.

The real secret of the most successful people on the web is that they are always trying new things. A lot of the time it's just for fun, because they are passionate about something and like to see how it works. But the benefit is that it's useful for business, too. Early adopters always know more about what's coming up, and that leads to advantages, over and over again. Companies that don't see how they should innovate will always lose to those that do. Innovative companies leverage information to dominate their marketplace. And so should you.

Finally, Why We Used Traditional Publishing

While we were working on the first draft of this book, we were asked repeatedly why we were using a traditional publisher (in this case, John Wiley & Sons) instead of going the indie route. People were saying that books are dead (something we said about radio in early podcasting days, too), and we were hearing many examples of people going with small publishers or using book services like Lulu.com for their publishing needs. In addition, both of us had published a number of e-books before, and the process was quick, effective, and fun. So we found ourselves on the phone one day, asking why we were choosing a real publisher instead of doing this on our own. Sure, publishing by ourselves would be more time-intensive, but the profit margins are higher and we'd have more control. Why, then, should we go with a traditional publisher? What was the point?

The phrase we came up with, which is admittedly crass but does drive the point home, is that we did it to “piggyback off the prestige of traditional publishing.” After all, we could have sold a great number of books on our own, and the marketing budgets for first-time authors is never huge, so most of the marketing efforts would be ours in any case. But could we have convinced anyone that what we were doing was quite as important if we had just decided to do it ourselves? We didn't think so. There's something kind of exciting about having a book deal and a traditional publisher—to the non-writing public, anyway—and we thought that it would give our ideas credibility in the “outside world” instead of just in our own little bubbles on the web. As we once heard veteran author David Maister say, “A book is like a big, thick, impressive $25 business card.”

Besides which, neither of us were really thinking about this book as a moneymaking venture in the first place. We'd been told a thousand times that writing a book for money is just not a smart thing to do. So, we took this route for what it could give us: old-world credibility. We know that blogging and new media, while useful to us and to all the people we are in business with, just isn't as credible to the gatekeepers at the top of the hill. This book is our key—it fits perfectly in the lock, and we hear a nice big click when we turn it. It opens doors just wonderfully. Leverage.