Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Do What You Know
Having attended a number of blogging conferences, workshops and seminars on podcasting and branding, and rubbed shoulders with those who have “made it” (i.e. have achieved some level of measurable success), I have stood in the back of the room listening to the wistful questions and unabashed announcements of tomorrows hopeful bloggers and startups. They ask about how to launch their good ideas, and they stay behind with others to glean tips and tricks, sometimes hoping to find shortcuts. I noticed a few years ago how success presentations had this motto that sounds like this:
“Do what you love, and the rest will follow.”
But I want to add another observation to that. Don’t just do what you love. Do what you know. Do something that you not only enjoy, but that you’re good at.
From an earlier day (and what sometimes feels like another lifetime!), I used to hang around a lot of religious people. Some of them taught me about this phrase called “transferrable concepts”, and though the terms were being used in the context of evangelical thought, it certainly isn’t limited to religious philosophy and practice. A transferrable concept is any skill, thought process, method, or practice which has applications across multiple platforms or environments. When a person is switching career tracks in mid-life, s/he would do well to take inventory of any skills that can be applied in multiple settings, because starting over in a new career at 45 is different from starting a new career at 21. However, skills such as speaking in public, preparing presentations, organization skills, and natural charisma and entertainment can transfer to a variety of settings, especially in the world of work and entrepreneurship.
The street performer in the Youtube video has made it clear that he is a performer, has not started a family, and has a roof over his head. He made this video to represent the hundreds of people and families who are homeless and invisible to many who pass them by on the streets. My point in sharing the video is to show you that there are many ways to use your skills if you understand what it is that you do, and you choose to do what you know.
Many years ago, I made the decision to step away from the clinical setting even though I have a cherished education in Nursing and a registered nurse license. Without knowing the other pieces that would come into play, I went on a search to find the best way for me to apply my skills in the workforce. If someone had told me I’d be a psychotherapist pushing a platform that merges the arts, healthcare, and charitable organizations together while using my love and knowledge of writing and business together, I’d probably look at them like he was an alien with three heads. Seriously, that idea wasn’t even conceivable for me.
Finding my voice and place in the world of blogging has been about doing what I know, and then building on that to expand my knowledge wide enough to press into doing what I love. I see so much passion in people for all kinds of ideas, but they don’t always stop to think about what it is they know, to start there, and then to add on what they don’t know so they can grow their ideas into reality.
Now, I realize that for every example of people sharing stories of doing what they know, the backlash will come forward from those who started with doing what they love first, and then adding on what they know. Maybe we’re both wrong, and it’s a simultaneous thought and action process that leads us down the path of connection with others, and the launching of brilliant ideas that effect people’s lives. I can’t say from my POV, because obviously, I haven’t gotten there yet.
I’m not a celebrity. I’m not well known.
People don’t stalk me for my picture or signature.
As far as I know, I’m not the subject of nasty gossip or vicious rumors (thank G-d).
At the same time, it incredible validation from so many personal interactions with the public who encounter my story and say to me, “Wow, of course that makes a lot of sense for you to do what you do because you have so much knowledge and personal experience.”
Do what you know. And of course, I hope it’s also something that you love.
What do you think? Does doing what you know or doing what you love come first? What’s your story? Is it usually enough to do what you love without much knowledge of the topic? For example, if you like talking to people about car racing, but you’ve never gotten in the cockpit of a race car, can you expect an audience or a brand based on your passion for race car driving?
Savvy or Sucker Marketing
For the past few months, I’ve been offering a few business-related blog posts for business owners. For those of you who have taken the step to put out your online “open for business” shingle by starting a website or web blog, you might have noticed an increase in emails asking if a company can help you increase traffic by monitoring your site, using SEO (search engine optimization), helping you select keywords that rank high on Google for your business niche, or adding you to a larger network of business owners boasting a large percentage of hits for your local. If you don’t know what these marketers are talking about, you owe it to yourself to figure out whether you can detect savvy or sucker marketing?
Know the difference between savvy and sucker marketing?
What is the difference between savvy marketing and sucker marketing? Savvy marketing helps you reach beyond cold contacts and close friend networks into the rich communities that may be already primed for your business.
To understand savvy marketing, you should experiment with what you can learn yourself. For example:
1. Conducting Google keyword searches for your niche. It’s free. What do you have to lose?
2. Experiment with what happens when you change meta tags, content, ads, and watch your website analytics over a period of time.
3. Note what content your audience responds to. Pay careful attention to how your contacts found you.
4. Paid advertisements are not created equal. Find out the ones that give you the best ROI. Keep track of which ads did well and where they were placed.
5. Create a quarterly or monthly newsletter, thanking your customers, and showing them what actions or methods of participation would help them belong to your network and/or community.
When you’ve done some of these things for yourself, you’ll be more savvy about when and who to hand this to should you choose to hire someone to maintain your website/webblog to increase your business contacts.
You will also be able to detect when you’ve been contacted by what I’m calling “sucker marketing”:
1. The caller tells you he or she works for Google. I find this practice unethical (and possibly illegal). For each person who has called me and said she worked for Google, they have had to “clarify” that she didn’t actually work for Google at all. However, she was reading from a script. This sucker marketing tactic is hoping you don’t know enough about online business and SEO and is banking on popularity of Google to get your attention.
2. The bot message in your inbox guarantees that it can increase traffic to your website if you’ll pay a fee, join their program, or hand over your website maintenance over to their marketer. Even if the company could increase your website’s traffic, there is no guarantee they will increase relevant traffic to your site. A marketing company’s guarantee must be based on whether they can bring you niche-rich traffic (a.k.a. relevant hits).
Want to do an inexpensive experiment on this? Take out an ad on Facebook, put a limit on the amount you’d be willing to pay in weekly time period, and do not put limits on demographics related to the ad. On a different week, add in al the demographics that apply to your niche, and change your ad to be keyword specific. Your traffic hits should go down, but the number of relevant contacts should increase.
If you are going to hire a company to do your marketing and web maintenance, make sure they understand your business niche.
3. The marketer tells you he knows the most effective keywords for your business, and you don’t know what those are.. This one honestly makes me laugh. You can find out more about keyword searches by doing a little research of your own. A great book I have mentioned before is Vanessa Fox’s, “Marketing in the Age of Google“, and she devotes much description and examples to how you can determine your business niche’s SEO-driven keywords to help your business rank high.
If you can at least do this part yourself to get a fundamental understanding, you are now poised to ask a few questions of your inquirers. The following conversation occurred last year, but is a summary of approximately five similar phone calls:
Marketer: Hi, I’m calling from Google. I saw on your website, www dot widgets dot com, that you aren’t ranking as high as you ought to for your business. I can help you discover keywords that you might not know about so that you can increase your website traffic.
Me: (acting dumb) Oh, wow! You work for Google? That must be exciting. You help businesses increase their website traffic, eh? What kinds of keywords are we talking about?
Marketer: Actually, I don’t work directly for Google. I work for XYZ company, but we work in conjunction with Google’s way of searching so that people can find your business. With keywords, let’s see…. with widget sales, you should be using keywords, A, B, and C.
Me: (still acting dumb) You mean, if I used keywords A, B, and C specifically on my website, that would help my business do better?
Marketer: Yes, those are the three main keywords for your business. We can…
Me: (interrupting) Well, thanks for letting me know those three keywords! That was great help. Bye! (hangs up phone).
In the above scenario, the marketer erroneously addresses me as the owner of the business, and not necessarily the same person monitoring my businesses website. The minute I detected the marketer’s “sucker” fallacies, I ended the conversation in a way that would likely guarantee I wouldn’t be addressed the same way. I also did not know the company that was named; this was a cold contact with no introduction via email or understanding of my specific business or its history.
In the ensuing months, you may be contacted by more marketers who now know you know something of your business. If you are ready to hire someone to help expand your marketing plan, select someone savvy who isn’t taking advantage of your lack of knowledge about how SEO works, what kind of content should go on your site, and what type of advertising you want to engage in for which kind of platforms. They should have experience with branding your type of business, and if they don’t but ask to use you as a way to gain experience, ask for a trial period and regular check ins.
3. You receive an email telling you to get in on the exciting world of mobile marketing. I put this in a similar category ask deep linking. Before you agree to do this, you have to look at your business practices, goals, and your present contacts. Did you ask them for permission to be contacted on their mobile phones outside of emails? You can lose good customers without taking time and care to consider what some mobile marketing methods may do to your business.
If your business is very new or very small, know that there is a lot of free information available to help you get started with marketing and branding your company, project, or idea (patented or not). You don’t have to pay beaucoup bucks up front unless you know a reputable person with a plan to build your market responsibly.
Remember, just because you put a website up does not mean you will get business overnight. You have to learn how to “work it”. Marketing can be very helpful, but know what is savvy and what is sucker-ish.
No Longer Ad-Free Zone
Though I never promised Hips For Hire’s site would be free of advertisement, I feel you should know why we’re not an ad-free zone anymore.
If you do a Google search under the keywords, “belly dance” and “Seattle”, you will discover just how many amazing professional dancers of Raks Orientale live and work here. Scan their websites, and you might notice one thing that is different from their websites than most others: they have no paid advertisement. For some, they feel that advertisements are a “sell-out” to their art, and not a necessity to run their dance businesses. Others may not understand how advertisement could actually help them receive more requests for gigs by driving traffic to their site.
From day one when I launched Hips For Hire, I knew I would need to break from the pack and do something different. The Internet market has changed the way we do business, and we don’t want to get left behind. I’ve carefully waited to put all the pieces in place, and now I have an umbrella over my head, waiting for pieces of poo to fly in my direction for doing what other web businesses are doing. At least they should know my reasons.
First of all, I managed to find my old Adsense account. For months, I was not able to access the account because of a lost username and password combination (my bad). Anyone who has ever used Adsense knows that it isn’t exactly the easiest site to understand, but once you get going, it’s a pretty cool world.
Second, it’s one of the smartest ways to drive traffic to your site while making a little passive income through revenue sharing. If you are an artist maintaining your own site, you might want to educate yourself a bit about relevant affiliate marketing, links, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A great book on the subject is, Marketing in the Age of Google (Vanessa Fox).
Third, I can control what kind of ads I want to place on my site by indicating what general categories I want. For example, if I am trying to help artists make better videos of their work, I can also place advertisements for inexpensive but high-quality cameras when prices drop.
With October 2010 being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, advertisement (like the image I posted in this blog) which stands in line with our objectives to support charitable organizations such as Susan G. Komen Foundation makes good business sense as well as compassionate common sense to help us use dollars we spend to do double duty in helping others. It’s simply time that we all got smarter about how we spend and how we help.
Did you know that every 69 seconds, somewhere in the world a woman dies of breast cancer? With early detection, minimizing risk, educating women on health issues, and better treatments through funded research, we can eventually lower that number. In the meantime, Hips For Hire stands in solidarity with other businesses like E.L.F., Commission Junction, and Shop The Net Affiliates, with affiliate marketing that does us all a world of good.
It doesn’t have to be all greed and consumerism. It can also include caring and sharing, as cliche as that sounds. We can’t help it. We like to do good things.
Oh, and keep your eyes pealed for news about an exciting Seattle-area Tweetup on Facebook that will help you experience the lap of luxury for a few bucks while raising money for the cure.
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