The Digital Gold Rush | Mining the miners | The Digital Coach Reading

How did Amazon and Google become so big so quick – Might be they know something about the difference between mining the miners and the art of mining.

What does Levi Strauss and Google have in Common?

They knew where the true gold was.

There is not much difference between the Gold Rush era and today’s digital gold rush. Except that maybe there could be a lot more winners if only you knew where to mine or better still if you knew were the real gold was. Lets see if we can help you find the real gold and stay away from fools gold.

From Palaeolithic caves dating back to 40,000 BC to the modern day, we mine, dig for, wear, spend and adorn it. We also let it define us in many ways; our wealth, wants, even whole ages. This metal is precious, opulent, luxurious and beautiful.

Yet, its true value is built into every glint, its glimmers igniting and captivating every one of our insatiable desires. The need for the best, power, riches and, most of all, for more. Now, modernity has brought us the digital age, a technological revolution bringing us fortunes and a network of wealth that miners, pirates and even monarchs could have only dreamt of.

But who has held and continues to keep this key to the treasure chest of prosperity?

From the Californian gold rush of the mid nineteenth century to today’s digital tunnels of the world wide web, this article will explore who is the miner and who’s really doing the mining.

Let’s Go Back To California’s Gold Rush Era

“Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Samuel Brannan bellowed, running up and down the streets of San Francisco wildly waving a glass jar of golden nuggets. This budding journalist and store owner embodied opportunistic savviness.

During the Californian gold rush (1848-1850) over 300,000 people migrated to this vast, lawless land each hoping to get their own little piece of this incredible deposited discovery. However, the profits of the merchants and suppliers far superseded that of the miners due to their resourcefulness and exploitation of the worker’s needs.

Brannan got hold of every pick and shovel he could. He bought pans for twenty cents and sold them off for fifteen dollars. Within weeks, he was making thousands. Miners worked tirelessly for very little gain if any at all. Native Americans were driven from their homes and viciously attacked. All the while the towns grew, and the merchant’s businesses thrived. So where is the Gold?

Fast Forward 150 Years

Fast forward 150 years later in the same state only this time in a garage in Menlo Park. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students founded Google, which is now the world’s most used search engine.

Let’s compare the Internet to the American River; the two young men are the wild cries of Brannan and Google is the equipment store. The Internet quickly recreated the frenzy of the gold fever.

Mining for digital gold became about getting your hands on the tools necessary to propel your business into the top search results.

Using The Internet To Mine For Business Success

In the realms of digital marketing your pick takes the form of SEOs, excavating keywords and enticing prospective customers by knowing want they want before they even add anything into their carts. The sturdy shovel is social media, digging up the dirt on our inquisitive natures, clearing the rubble to lure us in with targeted ads.

Then the pan, in the shape of personalized emails and campaigns, sifts through the waste to deliver the finest products.

We are all so desperate to get rich quick. To simply sow seeds and expect fruitful harvests year after year. Yet, such great wealth requires time, patience and acquiring the right tools in the right way.

In order to be successful, businesses must leverage all available digital channels to connect with their customer base. Digital marketing services offer essential technological equipment. Their support and guidance truly are the light at the end of the tunnel, flooding in the light of a more promising business strategy.

They take advantage of the immensity and limitlessness of digital marketing as the suppliers did of the miners nearly two centuries ago. Opportunities to extract and harbour digital tools lie in good mentors, people who specialize in a service that delves into the pits of human desire.

Introducing Levi Strauss

In order to connect our two historical events, we can look to a man whose company was born during the gold rush and still exists today in our technological era.

Here we chisel down the story of Levi Strauss, a Bavarian businessman who emigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s. Levi set up a branch of his family’s dry goods store in San Francisco. Unable to sell pieces of canvas for tents he sent them off to a tailor who made ten pairs of hardy brown trousers.

This seemingly standard item, with its simple yet durable design, was made of easy to clean material and came complete with pockets. The trousers sold instantly.

Twenty years later, San Francisco is a boomtown, a prosperous place of nearly 150,000 people. A customer of Levi’s and tailor from Nevada, Jacob Davis, became aware that further cloth was needed to reinforce the worker’s trousers. Using denim cloth, he designed waist overalls with metal rivets in places that were susceptible to wear and tear.

As he didn’t have the necessary funds he teamed with Levi and the pair patented their pair! The blue jeans were born.

At this point they were sold for a reasonable 3 dollars, but they were extremely popular, and Strauss and Davis had created something that became not only a necessity but also an icon.  From then until now Levi’s has generated change not just in the market but the workplace and the world.

What started as a family business with one of the partners not being able to afford the payment of a patent is now one of the world’s most well-known brands that’s worth almost 6 billion dollars.

As we are aware, jeans are not a mega expensive product to manufacture, but a pair of Levi’s now cost between 58-178 dollars. One has to question how they continue to make a profit.

It’s really quite simply because they’ve had many great successes from taking advantage and correctly targeting the market.

For example, their ‘We are Original’ campaign inspired 2.6 million Chinese youths, to create their own ads and their 2015 Project Jacquard collaboration with Google synchronised the merging of style with the heights of our modern-day technology feats.

This man was not only a pioneer in the fashion world but also the perfect example of how using opportunities rather than just taking them can create a longer lasting impact.

How Jeff Bezos Is Leveraging The Digital Age To Mine For Success

Another man who has basked in the splendour of the golden rays of economic bliss is Jeff Bezos, founder of the technology giant, Amazon. He is classed as the first centi-billionaire and is one of the richest men in the world.

Like all the characters of this interesting investigation into human’s fascination with gold, Bezos had to start somewhere. The ecommerce world was a new one when he first set out to launch his online bookstore in the 90s.

Amazon has taken over a decade to reach its 29 million Facebook followers and 3.1 twitter fans. This eager entrepreneur had to build a team which believed in his philosophy of striving for a service that was unique and would permeate the market by getting customers to come back for more and to always look to the bigger picture.

To further demonstrate his striking success, we only need to look at the return on his investment.

After writing his business plan on a cross country drive and adding the finishing touches in his garage in 1994, he accepted 300,000 dollars from his parents to launch Amazon. Like the student whizzes that founded Google, perhaps his story starts rather humble. No skyscraper boardroom with America’s elite throwing in millions. Like Bauman and Page and Brin, Bezos didn’t have stacks and stacks of cash at his disposal, instead he decided to trust in the market and focus on the tools.

While some businessmen were out there merely chiselling at the boundless opportunities of this new digital age, Bezos got out his hydraulic drill and was blasting at the rocks of the internet mines.

By July 2018 he was worth almost 140 billion. So, whether, you start with a small glass jar of nuggets, savings from parents, in a garage or a store in an old mining village; it’s about what you do with it.

It’s about taking one small nugget and making it a pile. Bezos never stopped mining; he went down every tunnel and into every field of digital marketing and really has struck gold.

So what does this mean for your business?

The great men discussed throughout this article are men not just of marketing prowess. They weren’t in the right place at the right time, as to become a millionaire mogul you need rich determination and a second to none support system.

To mine the economic treasures of our global golden markets you need steely grit and a go-getter mentality. You can pick and chisel and dig away but if you just turn back and give up you might never know you were about to hit the jackpot. Perhaps you were only ever an inch away.

In the same respect you can’t just bring in a bulldozer and knock the whole site down, maybe destroying the precious cargo at your feet.

Business Brainiac Jim Collins’ theory on this is ‘firing bullets before cannonballs’ as in find what works for you and your business before using all your resources on a miss. Bit by bit, work your way up to a cannonball, once you find out what works.

Your ideas, your strategies and your will are the bullets and they need to fire out into social media campaigns, ads to generate traffic, and blogs full of killer content etc. Once you find what works then you build the cannonball, made up of all these bullets and added investment.

The digital marketing support, that’s your sails, your steering, your navigation. You are the captain, but any good ship needs these supports.

Marketeers are not looking to run the ship only help guide it. You just have to accept the assistance and believe in your mission. It is all about the mind-set and not just having all these tools but knowing how to use them in the most effective way.

Everyone has ideas, everyone wants to make a killing and gone are the days where you could be a newbie. Take the time, effort and aid necessary to see beyond the horizon. Realise what your means are to see what you can really invest and hence, really achieve.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Brannon bought pans for twenty cents and sold them off to miners for fifteen dollars during the Gold Rush. He saw the opportunity the marketplace presented and leveraged the tools (mining equipment) that were available to him. He went on to become one of the biggest success stories of that era.

Levi Strauss made jeans for next to nothing and sold them for $3 to miners during the Gold Rush. He too saw the opportunity the marketplace presented (miners needed durable pants) and he leveraged the tools that were available to him (canvas and, later, denim). Levi was one of the big success stories of the Gold Rush and he’s now employing that same strategy in the digital age to continue that success. He’s leveraging digital marketing support and well-planned campaigns to strike gold in today’s competitive marketplace.

Jeff Bezos invested $300,000 in Amazon in the early days of the digital age. He saw the opportunity the marketplace presented and leveraged the innovative technologies and practices that were available to him. He had the idea and got the help he needed to bring that idea to life. Jeff is worth almost 140 billion dollars today.

Striking Gold In Today’s Digital Gold Rush

Whether it’s looking at the major merchants of the gold rush or the technology giants of our times, it is clear to see that proper tools are absolutely vital in order to achieve greatness.

Without a map and key, a treasure chest is forever an old wooden box. Without picks and shovels, miners are empty handed lost immigrants. Without digital marketing support networks, businessmen are to be wound and caught up in the never-ending threads of the World Wide Web with no success.

So the question is; you have the idea but are you ready to leverage the digital marketplace and the support that’s available to you? Are you ready to realise the world of opportunity that the digital gold rush presents to business owners?

If you read this and want to move out of the real of being a miner talk to us today.