Put Jokes on the Supermarket Bulletin Board and Become a Billionaire!
Would you believe me if I told you that this was possible?
Maybe they no longer exist, but you surely know what I’m referring to: The cork boards, bulletin boards, pin boards or whatever people usually called them.
You could have one at the office, hanging important pieces of paper on them (with your computer password, or the phone number of the pizza delivery), but they were also popular in some shops, mostly supermarkets, near the entrance.
People would try to sell their old bicycle or coffee machine through an ad on such a bulletin board, but many other messages were shared this way.
The concept actually worked quite well. There would be a reasonable amount of posts there, and the supermarket staff would now and then take a round and remove the oldest posts, so that only the most recent and still relevant were there, possible for interested customers to overview.
Of course, in some cases there wouldn’t be this friendly clean-up, so the bulletin boards often became a mess.
Now fast-forward to modern times. We do everything on the computer or, perhaps even more, on the mobile phone.
Any such bulletin will be put in a Facebook group for this kind of bulletins, or people will just throw away that old bicycle because they don’t know where to announce it for sale.
We live differently now, and most contact we have with other people seems to be through some kind of electronic device.
Social media has entered, and that is where we post everything.
But think about it for a moment: how many people would hang up something on the bulletin board in your local supermarket per day, when it still happened?
10? 100?
No matter how popular the place was, you would have a chance to get your message through. Some people would see it, and perhaps they would call you and buy your bicycle.
When you post something on social media, you are up against millions of people.
They will not all post in your bubble — the social media will somehow fragment the users and show a post to some of them only, but as you know from your doomscrolling sessions, there are definitely many posts to read. Many more than you can ever manage to read, no matter how long you keep scrolling.
Now imagine your post being put there, in the stream. Others will doomscroll just like you did, and your post will appear somewhere along the way, if they continue long enough.
Chances are, however, that most of them will never see your post, because there are too many others to look at.
Those who do see your post may be in the other end of the country. Or in some other country. So, even if your bicycle announcement may be seen, the readers may not want to buy on it.
What you can sell to everybody, though, is something electronic — something non-substantial. An e-book, for instance.
And that has led to an explosion of e-books for sale. So many, that the price needs to be set very low for it to work, and the most common price is, indeed, $0.00.
An e-book has no economical value, but you can sell it, for zero dollars.
Your old bicycle does have a value, but you cannot sell it, because you cannot get in touch with potential buyers. So, in effect, it has less value than the e-book. Less than something which is for free.
Try zooming out a bit, to get the bigger picture. You’ll see millions of free e-books announced, millions of other posts added to the social media bulletin board, and millions of people not being the slightest interested in any of it — that’s why they are doomscrolling; hoping to find something else that is interesting.
If someone told you that this is where your fortune lies: just post something into this mess, let it compete with millions of other posts about the attention of people who do not care — would you think that they were sane?
It is somehow an advanced form of madness to believe that adding even more noise to the inferno will be a way of earning money.
It’s a dead end.
The concept has developed from being a way for a small group of friends to share information into an all-comprising massive wall of information, some of it not fit-for-fight at all, never really being finished — you have seen this kind of posts, I assume; just fragments of information, like “I’m going to have a cup of coffee”, which doesn’t lead to anything else than a disruption of your thought stream.
Some other posts are well-made, but there are just too many of them, and they may be in the other end of the country, so to speak, telling about a topic that would be for a different group of people, not you.
Enter the gurus.
As it is clear that some people during the short life of the social media have been able to earn a lot of money on it, these gurus, coaches, whatever they call themselves, will have an easy time claiming that it is possible.
It clearly is possible, just look at this or that person who is a mogul, earning millions per month on posting to social media. Maybe the guru is themselves such one, at least somewhat — a small mogul. Trustworthy, because they clearly know how to do this, or else they wouldn’t be so strongly on their way to success, would they?
Each of them carefully craft a set of things you must do, and each of them know quite well that you wouldn’t believe them if they said that you could do it in a month. There must be a reasonable, trustworthy, amount of time between zero, now, and the the target.
For two reasons: one is trust; it has to look plausible. Most people have been through activities in life, such as a study, that simply took an amount of time with no shortcuts possible. It’s an established concept — success takes time.
The other reason is that the guru wants to sell you something on a subscription basis, and they want that to continue for a long period, so that they can earn more money.
If you look at the logic in it: The guru is apparently successful in doing something, but has decided to spend their time instead on teaching you how to become just as successful. Hmm… why are they not spending their time on doing what they are good at, running after the guru’ing instead?
Because, this is what they are trying to be good at. They have decided that the way to earn money is to tell people what the way to earn money is. And as this is a long-term activity, nobody will suspect anything being wrong if it doesn’t work right away.
Also, most of the reason for success or failure is on you. The guru just tells you how you can apply some tools, but it is up to you to use these consistently and wisely, paving your own way to success. Because, they can only show you the way, not walk it for you. Your destiny is your own.
This also means that the tools can be anything, really. It’s not the guru’s fault if it doesn’t work. It’s your fault. And not even that, because, if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger. Either you win or you learn.
Guru’ing is a safe kind of business, delivering fluff for you to shape a life from. Any substance is for you yourself to add. That’s your success factor.
So, what do these social media gurus tell you?
Consistency is king
Keep publishing, even if nobody is reading it
It’s not about the amount of readers, it’s about who reads it
Even if there are seemingly no readers, they are there, just not saying anything
You can publish anything, just keep it short and simple
You must publish a lot
You shouldn’t publish a lot
You should focus on what you are good at, your special expertise
It doesn’t matter what you focus on, just do it consistently
You need a niche, something that is only yours
You don’t need a niche, just make each post engaging
Etc.
You can make these advices yourself. They are nothing but fluff.
A substantial advice would be, as an example:
Write 200 word long posts to publish twice a day at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. in your own time zone, about the use of vacuum cleaners in medical laboratory environments. Make sure to study the topic carefully before you start. Have an e-book ready to sell that describes, in 200 pages, how different ways of using vacuum cleaners can affect the laboratory work in positive and negative ways, with real-life examples and an exclusive list of reference customers to contact for their experiences.
You get the idea? Substantial advice must be more specific, it must be suitable for making a plan to follow, that will lead to success, if done well.
This particular example advice may not work well, but if you are going to move forward successfully, you need to know what you are doing and have a clear idea on how to do it and what your goal is.
A consistent posting of any kind of crap, niche or not, will perhaps build you a following, but it won’t make you rich.
Using those modern bulletin boards requires you to hit right with a message that matches someone’s needs, this leading to something actionable. Otherwise, they will just scroll over it and never even notice that it was there.
However, you can catch attention with other stuff, and this may make people click on like or otherwise react to your message. The social media algorithm, corresponding to the supermarket staff cleaning the bulleting board for only relevant messages to be there, will allow for more people to see your posts going forward — and those who reacted, will more likely see your next posts.
And this is where the jokes come in.
On some of the fast-scrolling media, jokes have become a great way to catch people’s attention. Especially if they are visual. Cartoons are great, and with your wise, short, comment added to it, people may even remember that the joke came from you.
If you mix in this kind of contents in your flow, you may, on those platforms, build up a following who likes to read your posts.
But the jokes will most likely not make you a billionaire. In fact, if you are in a position where you need to learn what to do on social media to become “as popular as the most popular”, you are already out too late.
Every social media platform has an introduction phase where a bunch of invited, initial influencers have been given the privilege to run this up. They will be supported by the platform, having an easy time getting seen and being promoted in every way, and they may become very rich from it.
But after that, the platform is focused on dragging in as many ordinairy users as possible. They already have the wolfs, now they need the sheep. As many as possible.
In order to boost the process of attracting and dragging in the ordinairy users, they tell the stories about the initial, successful influencers on the platform, and they allow for a second wave to build up a reasonable business by telling others how to do it. For a while.
On all the mature platforms, we have seen how some of the top influencers keep being promoted but others have been pushed out, and the second wave of influencers, the first line of gurus, have been giving their time in order to then being pushed out.
Left are all the ordinairy users of which a lot believe that they can do the same as one of the first two waves, leading many people into trying out their luck as gurus.
But it is too late, as the platform doesn’t need that anymore and won’t support this third wave in any way.
The jokes, however, are still attracting people while they are doomscrolling, and they can make a basis for further communication. Just not into the big earnings, as this is an illusion that has never been true — a construct with the help of the initial influencers, to act as marketing for a platform that basically doesn’t want to help you become rich, it rather wants the opposite:
The platform wants you to pay with your money, attention to adverts, or your data, for being there, trying and trying to become rich, never understanding that all that really works is — a joke.