Metal Motivation

For several years, I have been learning from an interesting Facebook marketer. CJ Ortiz is a metal head philosopher who is trying to position himself as a motivational speaker of the heavy metal music community. CJ has built an elaborate “Metal Motivation” website with great graphics and videos. He is an articulate speaker and fantastic writer. He knows how to use both sides of a video recorder. He can relate to a sub-culture very few other people understand. And he has a unique perspective on motivational training, which is applicable to many outside of the heavy metal community. If CJ can move a few metal heads (and regular people) to move their lives in a more positive direction, I can only salute him.

CJ has done many things right. Crafting his unique talents toward a niche market, he has built a following of about 35,000 fans, mostly by Facebook marketing and word-of-mouth within the metal head community. With his online store selling T-Shirts and motivational CD/ DVD recordings and CJ delivering a few gigs a year as a public speaker, Metal Motivation seems to be a viable business.

Is CJ making enough money at Metal Motivation to quit his day job as a graphic designer and marketing consultant? I suspect that, given all the hours he has spent building Metal Motivation, it will be a labor of love for a few more years. If Metal Motivation stays where it is, CJ will regard it as his contribution to making the world a better place. If it goes further into a full time occupation, it will be because of his persistence, passion, and talent—but mostly persistence.

The recent changes at Facebook have diminished CJ's ability to reach his fan base. He either has to spend some advertising money (which he probably can't recover with his sales) or make many more posts on his wall to reach his fan base (which takes time out of his day.)

Like CJ, many other Facebook marketers have built up their following being under the assumption fans will always see all of their posts. While CJ has been stoic about the change (he recognizes that Facebook is the actual owner of the software and has the right to make whatever changes it wants), he and other FB marketers cannot rely on this tool to get their message out consistently in a cost-effective way.