I once read a sign in a locker room that has always stuck with me: “If You Hit Your Hand with a Hammer Every Day, It Will Never Get Better.” Before we jump into the main significance of this message, I’d like to point out that I saw this sign years ago and still remember it quite clearly. The message was quick and to the point and was accompanied by a simple image. Remember there’s a time and place for longer content. Think about the audience and location of your ads before you develop your copy. Not to perpetuate any derogatory stereotypes, but guys in a locker room probably aren’t looking to read a whole lot. A quick and tempting ad has the power to persevere and remain locked into your audience’s minds. Okay, so now that I’ve gotten my standard tangent out of the way, we’ll get into the marketing meat and potatoes I originally intended.
Unless you’re one of those athletes who continued hitting yourself in the head with that hammer, then the sign’s message should be quite clear: Your injury will never heal if you continue participating in your sport and don’t do anything differently in your routine. As I am just short of the athletic talent level of Tiger and Gretzky, I decided to pursue the limitless possibilities of the Internet, and have remembered this sign for a different reason. In my sapling days, when I was a young and inexperienced entrepreneur, I sometimes found myself experiencing aggravating defeats in my marketing ventures. The element that made them the most aggravating was that my lack of success was consistent. It seemed that even though I had some great input from some marketing gurus and had applied my own Einstein-level of genius that my ads just weren’t gaining the traction I thought they were capable of. Then I saw the sign…literally.
When I read that sign, I realized I’d been hitting my injured marketing campaign with a hammer and expecting it to get better. I was so confident in the ads I had going that I managed them like a desperate soon-to-be-vagabond in Vegas, playing the same number over and over again in roulette, thinking that I was improving my chances simply because of numbers and time elapsed. Your bootstrapped marketing campaign should be looked at the same—you’ve got an equal chance of failure or success with every prospect. Granted, sales and marketing does ultimately come down to a numbers game, increasing your chances of a sale with every person you ask, but you are a bootstrapped budget and can’t always afford to play the game of large numbers.
Lesson learned: Whether it came down to wrong geographical location, incorrectly targeted demographic, outlying economic factors…I came to realize that even though I had some fantastic ideas and approaches involved in my ads, they simply weren’t working. Don’t hold on too long to ads or business methods that aren’t working or you’ll end up with an extremely bruised and battered hand. A particular method to help you decide how well something’s working for your business is conducting an A/B split test. For example, create two versions of an ad for the same exact product/service. To ensure accuracy, make sure you disseminate those ads equally among demographics and locations. Then, measure and compare the results of ad A versus ad B. Go with the one that garnered the best results, and then use that ad to create another split test down the road. Because even though you may have managed to put the hammer down, you may still be able to look into some business supplements to take you to an even higher level of success.
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So, we’ve mentioned the importance of monitoring your marketing and we’re going to continue to do so because of its great importance. Otherwise, if you’re not monitoring your marketing, then it’s similar to throwing a piece of bait into the ocean without securing a line to it. Where did it go? What happened to it? You’ll be asking the same questions about your budgeting if you don’t keep a careful eye on promoting your business.
What’s one of the best ways to keep track of what’s working and what’s not with your marketing? Just ask. It really can be that simple. You should always have several marketing lines in the water, so if you get a new prospect or client, they could have come from any number of sources. One of the first things you should be asking them is “How did you hear about us?” or “Where did you find us?” You should also be sure to ask people via your website as well.
This method may not be earth-shatteringly new, but we just don’t see it that much on the Web or hear people asking us as much. Plus, you know the old adage, when we assume, it makes an ass out of u and me. Even if you’ve heard it before, its significance still bares repeating. By asking people how they found out about you, you then get a direct laser beam on your marketing. If after a couple of months of marketing, you find that 10 people found you through the local newspaper ad you posted, 50 people found you through the Internet and one person found you through your postcard mailers, what does that tell you? Dump the mailers and reallocate that funding towards your Internet and newspaper ads; with a majority of it going towards the more successful method.
We specifically suggested waiting a month or two before assessing your marketing because you should always be looking at statistical significance. Granted, statistical significance does sound pretty cool in a complex way, but it’s pretty simple. If you make an assessment after a week, then that hasn’t allowed enough people to see your add to make an accurate judgment. For example, at that point, you could have had one person across the board, which would have suggested that you keep investing your money equally in each marketing category. But as we saw after a few months, that would have meant a big waste in postcard mailers. So be careful about taking one set of numbers as gospel.
Speaking of statistics, you might gain a lot from a basic statistics class. Don’t worry, there’s no real brain teasers involved and you don’t have to be a true mathematician. What it will do is help you get a general grasp on the behavior and trends of numbers in your business and industry. From knowing what’s statistically significant enough to base your bootstrapped budget on, to knowing that correlation most certainly doesn’t always mean causation, a little extra education here and there will always help boost your business.
We’ve all heard of people flipping real estate; buying the house for a low amount, doing some minor/major work on renovations and then selling for a profit. Now people are doing the same thing with websites, site flipping. But is it a fly by night profession or another great business avenue for people to take? In this article I want to dig a little deeper into the subject. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Concerns about site flipping
There are a few arguments I see a lot when talking about site flipping, one I see the most being the fact that quick built websites are ruining the quality of the internet. In my opinion, you can’t hurt the quality of a place with billions upon billions of websites already floating around google. Searching for “clinic” in google brings up 115 MILLION results. Now, building websites targeting this keyword really will not make a dent in he amount of quality information out there. So regardless if people think its wrong, you can still do it for and make a profit for it.
Build with quality in mind
Even if you’re putting up a website to just sell, you should still treat it as a website you’d be proud to tell people you own. Flooding the page with 20 ads but only have 500 words is not something (in my opinion) to be proud of.
If flipping is your game and you want to make a go of it, as always it starts with great content, a desire to make it work and a determination to keep going. I am a shining example of an entrepreneur who loves the thrill of the build, it is almost like a high but coming off it when heading into the “maintain it” stage of the lifecycle is when I get extremely bored and restless.
This is not uncommon, look over the history of the vast percentage of the fortune 500 companies and you will find that usually the founder is not the person running the company any longer.
So if your unique ability is in finding a niche, building a following, passing it off and doing it all over again this could be a very profitable business model for you.
In this economy – flip the coin over
With the daily economic doom and gloom that is shoved down our throats, it’s hard to remember that we are in the middle of one of the best buyer’s market we have seen in a long time. History has proven that more millionaires are created in a recession if you take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves when people are scared.
Buying websites may be one of the easiest of these markets to get into because I don’t think there is a lot of “noise” in this market yet. This blog is an example of the power of this. I had been looking and learning everything I could about online marketing when I stumbled on the marketplace at sitepoint.com and found this site for sale. It was inline with my passion, had a great community and I saw that I could provide value to the readers and have a place to build credibility for myself without having to start from scratch and presto here I am.
Now when this economy turns around I will have an asset that I can choose to keep or be able to sell when it is the right time to do so. I believe that in the future websites that have strong ranking, a big following and good content will catch the eyes of bigger companies wanting to get a foot up on the competition.
Either way I’m left with choices and that is never a bad thing.
Doing what you love seems deceptively simple. We should know what we love, but we often confuse this with what others expect us to love, what we do to fill our time, and what we merely like.
Our friends, family and society have expectations of us which vary greatly. If you look at practically any program on television, you will see what society currently expects us to want and love. These images influence our behavior, even if we do not completely understand it.
Sometimes we are pressured to make our hobbies into more than they are. My friend Jen is a crafter in her spare time. She has a flair for making adorable dolls, but once she started taking commissions, her hobby became a chore. In this case, Jen didn’t really love what she was doing. Making dolls was a pleasant time filler, but it was little more than that.
When you truly love what you do, you get a sense of joy the moment you begin. Something you love will energize you and make you feel better about yourself, what you’re doing and life in general. Loving your business will bring harmony into your life; in and out of your workplace.
If you know you love what you do and are still working at making it a business success check out the article titled “From Passion to Profits”.
I design websites that increase a companies profit and branding.
The above sentence is the statement I give all of the people that I meet face to face and ask me the question “What do you do for a living?”. After that introduction, I instantly have them hooked and am followed up with a “How” or “Wow” in which I then proceed to explain in a bit of further detail some of the specifics of my blog design company. If you run a business, a sentence like this is priceless to your profitability.
When I say “one hit wonder” most will think of a musician who releases one great song but is never seen again. That is the complete opposite of what this introduction can do for you. This one sentence can make or break many deals. Time is money, and attention spans are increasingly small today so anything you can do to instantly grab the attention of the person across from you, your computer screen or promotional materials puts you far ahead of the pack.
Get your company and your opening statement reviewed
What I’d like to do is have anyone reading this to leave a comment letting me know what you do for a living and a possible one hit wonder sentence you use or could use and I will go through them and list everyone’s replies in a future article along with my thoughts on each; what the positives of the sentence is or what could be done differently.