RTFM
27 February: I’ve been reading a lot of business writing lately. Some of it is really high quality, such as the stuff at Copyblogger (I’m a fan, and it inspires me). But I’ve also read some truly self-serving stuff, writing that’s bandied about as informational but is really just promotional.
One of these was a guide to getting started with email marketing by a company in the UK. They lost me in the first couple of pages when they failed to list some of the more popular commercial email list solutions (like MailChimp), instead listing themselves and a couple of obscure companies I’d never heard of. Then they came up with the comment that “installing your own software” was “painful” and “not to be recommended.”
I’m from the first generation that had home computers-my first one had 1K of memory. By the time I was a teenager, I started programming in BBC Basic, and then stopped for years and years. I simply got bored and had no real use for it.
Then, years later when I was starting to dabble in online communities and did have a use for it, I learned to install perl/cgi scripts and modify them a little. Then I came across a programming language that fit all the needs I had and made sense.
I have subsequently become a reasonable PHP/mySQL programmer. and I know that I’m not typical, but anyone can install an out-of-the-box program, like the PHPList email software, because you don’t need to be a programmer.
If you can upload a file via ftp and unzip a zip file, and you’d better be able to if you have your own website, then you can install programs. What’s the trick? You carefully read the instructions.
Don’t get me wrong. I remember tearing my hair out in frustration at one of my earliest attempts when I didn’t know what “path” meant. But guess what? All that stuff is out there on the Internet, waiting for you to use a little initiative. There are Dummies books. There are forums.
Want to know how I know this? Because I learned to. I don’t have any technical training. I did the arts stream at school. I’m not a natural-born programmer. When it comes to computers, I’m nothing special.
But I do know how to read instructions. And to think. And I do pick away at most things I don’t understand, and ask questions. You do too. You can too.
I will only use a commercial solution if the free version doesn’t do what I need it to do, and even then I’ll find a work-around. Commercial solutions are so popular because they are easy and require no thought. Entrepreneurs are generally noted for being free-thinking. And noticing when a company is disguising its sales messages as useful content is part of that free-thinking mindset.
And if spending a couple of hours installing and setting up my own program will save me hundreds in fees over the years, well-I’ll do it. It’s a good ROI.
This was cross-posted from Raven's Roads. You can comment here or there, but if you could bring yourself to comment there rather than here, that would be very nice. Here's the link to comment over there