Focus on permission-based marketing and customer benefits to formulate a winning plan. Then just Get It Going and build a relationship with your lists.
For those learning to run a business using the Internet, there are a few HUGE hurdles to overcome. Here’s a quick list of the highlights. These apply whether you are handling everything yourself from a home office, or if you have a company and are delegating a bit of social marketing to your staff.
This one is tough, but remind yourself of it constantly. If you try to work 3 jigsaw puzzles at one time, it will take 10 times as long to finish them. Go ahead and mix all those pieces together and watch your timeline expand 50 times larger than just working one puzzle.
That will happen to your Internet efforts as well. Work on 5 approaches, especially if they are a mishmash of advice from 5 different sources, and you should not expect to see any results. It’s that simple.
Again, get started using the Internet for marketing purposes and there are literally thousands of people offering advice. They don’t know you. What they do know is that they can probably convince you that you don’t know enough. That you really need another expert how-to guide. They can knock you off-kilter. They can convince you that you are not enough, by yourself, to work all this out. And you should invest in their course, their membership, or their whiz-bang tool.
The solution here is to get some focus, decide on a course of action, pick a mentor or marketing outsourcer or techie outsourcer, and go get some results. Getting a sales process set up, with a lead capture front-end and some automated follow-up emails going out to those leads is a great place to start. Dedicate yourself to this process. Get it to work. You’ll get signups, and if you build some trust and develop a bit of familiarity and relationship with those people, you should achieve some sales.
And at that point you reassess. You can improve what you have, or declare it a good learning exercise and start over with greater insight at your disposal.
In a nutshell, pick ONE approach, hopefully break open an ebook off your hard disk detailing a workable lead generation system – or hire someone to work with you – and get (um…Build!) yourself a targeted list that wants what you have got.
One other piece of this puzzle is this fact: If you start to learn internet marketing or social marketing using YouTube and twitter and facebook, you WILL get marketed to. People who are at the top of their game, world-class marketers, will be in YOUR mailbox offering you all sorts of offers. Some offers will be good for you. Many or most offers will actually be a distraction. If in doubt, assume you’re looking at a distraction.
I believe it was Marlon Sanders, one of the very good “big guys” in my book, that had this advice for his staff:
If some tool is required, get it. They all had access to plenty of funds to purchase tools and training as needed. But to further define required, he said this: If you need something in the next hour, then it is required.
Practice “just in time” learning versus “just in case” learning. Spend more time deciding WHAT to learn, and less time applying more new charges to your credit card. Think. Make a decision. And not just the easy ones – start flexing your decision muscles on some, “This path, or THAT path?” questions. It gets easier with time, because you’ll get better at doing it.
Ok, this one is something I’ve been meaning to tell everyone for a while. Recently I started seriously checking out Lee McIntyre and Alex Jeffreys. Today I logged in here to write some scary posts, and DECLARE some things.
Guess what – Alex Jeffreys tells his students to huddle together, strength in numbers stuff. Hooray!! I had a comment from an Alex Jeffreys student waiting in my dashboard, waiting for me to moderate it. Boy, does THAT feel good!
Yeah, join a crowd. I’m going to build a crowd here on my site. There are lots of places to flock. Find some folks that genuinely seem to be going the same direction as you. Spend some time with them. Invest in some relationships. Don’t go about this stuff in a vacuum with a couple textbooks (or digital dust knowledge collections called ebooks). Find some people to talk to, get encouragement from, and when you’ve built up a bit of a friendship – get some HONEST feedback as well.
Myself – I’m enrolling this week in the “crowd of Alex Jeffreys students”. It’s a successful crowd. Time to make my contribution to the flock. Time to toss my hat in the ring, add to the published info talking up Mr. Jeffreys methods. And don’t bother getting it right – Just Get It Going.
Cheers,
Tim “Get-It-Going” Junck
P.S. This has been a draft in my blog since March 18th. Ouch. I added a bit, and clicked publish. How About You?
