I made a follow-up call to a man about his marketing needs. He previously asked me to follow up, and so I did just that. Within about a minute of my call, he said “Well, this is a really busy time of year for us” and started with more excuse-crafting. I interrupted him to say “Hey Bill, I am not calling to waste your time” and quickly ended the call. What I really meant was that I was not calling to waste my time, and I think he got the point.
Bill is a man who knows very well why his company is bleeding money. He knows that he needs better marketing. That is why we have been talking. He expresses good intentions, but he always has an excuse. Is being busy a good reason to put off better marketing? Is money a good reason to put off better marketing? Is there really ever a good reason to put off something that will improve your business?
Let us consider where money comes from in most businesses. It comes from doing more business, and that means more customers. More customers comes from marketing. Is this really such a mystery?
“Procrastination Tax” is the Extra Cost of Waiting
People have been frustrated by taxes for centuries. They vote, they write their government leaders, and they even overthrow their government, but mostly they complain. They complain a lot! I hear people every day complain about the economy, and how everything is swirling down a big toilet bowl. I am not completely excluding myself. I don’t like it any more than the rest of you. The difference I make is that I realize one of the biggest “taxes” I pay is “procrastination tax”.
Putting things off until it is too late, or until the cost of waiting makes problems much worse is common. It is one of the easiest mistakes to make, and also one of the most damaging. The good news is that you have a choice.
For somebody like Bill who makes excuses, the additional cost caused by procrastination is high. He said that this is a busy time of year. It is the time when his business seems to be getting better. It only lasts for a short time, and then things will be slow again. Bill knows this, because he has been in his business and waiting for the next busy season for decades. Wouldn’t it make sense to maximize that seasonal opportunity, since it only comes once in a while? By procrastinating, Bill has effectively put off his best chance to turn his business around and stop losing more money until another year. Yes, another whole year before he will have another opportunity like he faces right now. Another year with mediocre results … and that is if all goes well. Another year to worry about whether he socked away enough to make it through the next slow period. Another year that he could have done more business and grown his company and had an even better year, next year.
I wonder how many years Bill can waste procrastinating before he realizes that action today is worth a lot more than action tomorrow. For some industries there is a year between each big rush, and for others it is a much shorter time. In any case, the tendency to wait for just the right time can have damning results to a company. I wonder how Bill will feel when he looks back a year from now and wishes he had set a better plan in motion. Oh yes, and next year will come … faster than ever.
Bill will always be waiting for something. While he waits for the perfect time, his procrastination tax is growing each day.
This reminds me of something my mother told me many years ago. She said “If you wait until you are ready to have children, you will never be a father.” I have three kids now.
Does Upbringing Affect Your Business?Money is a huge topic for businesses and marriage alike, and they are each influenced greatly by psychology. The psychology surrounding money is so profound that many of us lose all sight of why we do the things we do … and why others do the things they do. Losing sight of the power and myths of money will often create a huge confusion and misrepresentation for people in their marketing efforts. Yes, I am tying money, marriage, and marketing all together, and I will not get to the point in only a couple paragraphs, but upbringing and psychology really do have a place here in marketing. Here are just a couple thoughts for your day, and I hope you can find ways to use this.
I could write all day on the topic of people’s psychology surrounding money. Perhaps this is because I have been in business for a while … over 20 years. In that time, I have controlled squillions of dollars. I have seen how even the topic of money makes people squirm. Sales representatives may love to show their product, but when it comes time to ask for the money, it is the scary and uncomfortable moment of “yes” or “no”. Money is a top cause of divorce, and yet, seldom the top cause of happiness. I can say these things about money and back them with statistics, and I can say them from experience, because I demystified it by making a ton of money. I have earned money at rates that would make some countries jealous. I have also lost money at rates that would make most people leave a pucker mark in their seat. I know both sides of the money deal. I also know that overcoming money and doing great things for great purposes and putting the fears away can create even more joy, inspiration, and success than chasing the dollar. I even wrote a great (of course I say “great”) book about creating joy and inspiration. No, I didn’t write it for the money, either.
Basics of Money and Psychology
So, let’s look at the basics first: A business needs money to survive. They use their money to create more money. Of course, without money, a business cannot survive. Tragically, when left to their own devices, many businesses will focus more on what they sell, and forget to properly address this one essential fact: Every decision about money is made by a person. Even decisions coming from the most brilliant boardrooms and teams of financial experts still come down to people. They make decisions the best they can based on information, and some of the most important information comes from their experience. This means that their psychology plays an enormous role in whether they decide to do business with you or not. Regardless of the job role, whether it is as a spouse, executive, or etcetera, they rely on their decisions to please themselves and / or others around them. Making the wrong decision of buying from your company could come in the way of the things they seek. Are you surprised? Probably not, but how much do you consider this in your marketing?
The topic of psychology of money came to mind while I was on the phone with my wife as she was driving home from taking our kids to her parents home for a visit. Our kids will spend about a week with their grandparents, as they do each summer. They will catch toads, get muddy, and ride horses. We will miss them very much, but it is a great adventure for them.
We got to talking about the years we have spent together and the ways our upbringing still influences our companies. We will soon celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary, and we have spent nearly every day of the last ten years together, working, playing, and raising our family. We talked about the way her parents once really doubted our decisions and our ways of being self-employed and owning multiple companies. When we merged two of our companies back in 2001, I recall her parents liking me and hating me at the same time. We spent every dollar we had to build a business and create something big for our future. Her parents have always worked for companies and had a great sense of security from that. They raised their daughter (my wife) to think that way, too. They often did not understand our ways of sacrificing today for tomorrow, and the struggles it would require. I understand how a parent thinks. I have three kids. I want good things for them and I want them to always be secure.
It made me think of two dramatically different psychological approaches to money. There are the kind like them, who feel more secure with other people’s decisions about money. The company will handle all of the money, and they will give the employees their cut, in the form of a paycheck. Then, there is the kind who run the companies, make hard decisions about money for other people, and have what some would consider a risk taker mentality. I was raised by entrepreneurs who never understood the idea of having a job. It rubbed off, and I think working for somebody as an employee would be about the scariest thing. Actually relying on the mood or means of a boss to feed my family spooks the heck out of me. It seems to me that either approach has its risks. Either has its long term and short term advantages and disadvantages. I think most people live their lives in a safe space somewhere between my wife’s parents and my parents. They find a comfort zone that keeps them feeling good.
I say to heck with the comfort zone … you will never experience “spectacular” being comfortable. Your sofa is comfortable, too, but seldom very productive. That is just me … and yes, it gives me that crazy little edge you may have picked up on.
Companies have had a lot of shake-ups in the last couple years. People are doing jobs they never expected to do. Many have entered business ownership against their will or their plans. Markets have changed, and jobs are scary … self-employed or otherwise. Many people react with more caution than ever, and it is hard to call them “wrong” for this. Much of the reaction in a marketplace comes from psychology, and when it involves money, there is sure to be a look-back into their upbringing and the things which made them who they are.
Be careful how you address these matters of money and psychology. You may have to justify your cost more than ever. You may have to develop a more meaningful call to action and a better value proposition. It will make your company stronger and better than ever. It will probably cost money, too. Don’t fight it when it is for your benefit.
Who Is On Your Front Line?When the world spoke to you and said “You should have a blog”, you listened. Well, at least hundreds of millions did. Others may take a while to catch on and understand the many good reasons to blog. Overall, blogging has caught on extremely well in the past few years. Companies understand that a good blog with things people want provides a means to reach more potential customers than any other method. It can create a lot of additional sales. In fact, it can create a lot more sales than any sales representative you’ve got … even the very best of them. It can also make closing the sale a lot easier for the whole company, and greatly reduce marketing overhead. The potential customer has already done the research about what you offer, and if they contact you, they are already mostly sold.
This all begs the question of how your blog will come across to those potential customers. If you look at your blog like it is a sales representative, would it be the sleazy representative you hired and later regret the decision; the representative who makes people’s eyelids heavy and need a nap; or the sharp and clever representative who makes up your top percentile of volume producers? This really all depends on the person or people behind the blog. If you stop looking at it like a “thing” and start looking at it like your top sales representative, it can make a big difference.
Make no mistake! Blogging can create massive exposure to a company, and drive huge success, but it can also fail miserably without a great plan, clever branding, and fantastic content. If you look at it with the potential of becoming your top sales representative, it takes on a whole new feel, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t the people behind the blog have the skills of a master, and not just anybody you can find to produce it for the lowest cost? Really, this is your business front … shouldn’t you take that pretty seriously?
You should have a plan, and I mean a serious strategy to get what you want. What does this mean for you? For me, it means constantly trying to help people with great ideas, branding myself with a touch of snarky humor, and producing enough fantastic content that some of you will say “this guy really knows his stuff and I’ll bet he could help me sell a lot more if I pay him.”
That is my example … but what about you? Here are some questions to ask about whomever you will trust with your online business front. If it is you, these questions become even more challenging, and you should try to be very honest with yourself.
Do you know what readers want?
Do you understand the technology, psychology, mathematics, and creativity necessary to get what you want?
Can you produce the brilliant content it takes to stand out among thousands of worldwide competitors?
Are you able to amass enough readers that you can mathematically predict how many will become customers?
Do you understand the numbers and use them to optimally further your growth?
Can you defend your company’s position against naysayers?
Is online marketing your real job, or it is just another thing you feel you have to do?
Could somebody else do it better, and if so, will they work for you or for your competition?
The list can go on, but this should be enough to think about for now. Take inventory of these things and consider how you stack up. Is the best sales representative on the job?
Will You Get All the Pieces Right?
Do you know how to harness the value of what people want, and how to spread it to the masses? If not, I know a web guy who is for hire, and that can help you with a better call to action.
Blogs Are Not Created Equal
All blogs are not created equal, and they are as different as the people behind them. Some will create amazing success, and some will be miserable failures. Remembering this and recognizing the marketing talent and creativity of the people behind the blog as the reason for success is important. It can save you a whole lot of time and money to do it right, and not just do it like everybody else.
Who Loves Pink Ponies?Sometimes I wonder how pink ponies became so popular in today’s Internet marketing world. Then again, I guess I should stop wondering. People just love buying pink ponies and fairy dust. It is a shame, but when I look around the Internet and talk to people, I have to believe it is true. They think there is a magical fix for their dwindling or less-than-stratospheric profit levels.
Pink Pony Rental: $180 Per Month
I do not like to call people stupid. I try to inform them, instead. It usually doesn’t work, because the majority of people really love pink ponies, fairy dust, and all the other Internet marketing magic that gets sprinkled into their eyes every day. I can only try my best to save one or two of you.
I see a lot of “SEO companies” (that’s search engine optimization for the record) offering packages for placing companies at the top of search engines for search terms. The packages often consist of submission to a squillion search engines and directories, building incoming links to the client’s website, and a bunch of other magical fairy dust. Some of them will say their magic potion includes creating h1 tags (Google h1 tags and see where my article about h1 tags is), meta tags (serious, this is a joke) and HTML title tags (sure, that is all it takes).
What bothers me is how hard some people’s heads are when you try to explain that pink ponies and fairy dust are just ways that pretend SEO companies take people’s money and then leave them thinking that this whole Internet thing is a big unicorn chase. I hope this is not the case with you, but based on the numbers … the real hard facts … you probably have a lot of room for pink pony rentals deep in your heart. If you keep reading, I am going to smash some pink ponies into tiny little bits and eat them. This is not for the faint of heart.
Maybe you believe in magic, and you aren’t ready to put down your “My Little Pony” doll. Fine, but maybe you should mark your calendar for a good time to have somebody pop that bubble for you and help you to do things that actually work. You know, things that actually increase your profit and create more sales. If you are in business, profit is what you need, right? Not precious little pink ponies and fairy dust. Just in case you are not ready or you are in SEO relapse, I will give you a fun little pony video to look at while your competition continues reading and takes away some more of your profit.
SEO Magic Takes Research, Targeting, and Talent
Call it “SEO magic” if you like, but real Internet marketing and SEO takes research. Real research … the kind that compiles real data and has a focus on real results. You do not get that with an out of the box SEO service offering … for any price.
Once the research is done, online marketing success requires a targeted approach to reaching the right audience. The research tells who the audience is, but knowing where to find them and targeting their attention is another task. This is often skipped and companies end up with the equivalent of trying to sell knitting needles to race car drivers. Is that the right audience to spend your money marketing toward?
When you understand who and where the audience is, it takes marketing talent (yes, you should click on the link about marketing talent) to convert those lookers into buyers. This is the artistic part of SEO and Internet marketing, and an important piece. If you get this part wrong, you can just drop a signed blank check in Times Square right now. Your money is wasted … gone … poof … it disappeared!
After these things are handled, it takes more research and understanding the marketing data to know where to focus the next efforts. When you discover what works, it is time to keep doing it, only better than before. That is what takes profit into orbit.
Oh, and I probably should not leave out the huge fact that it takes a website that does not suck. Here, read a story about a $150,000 website that sucks.
When you think about these things, maybe you can drop me a comment to tell me how stupid I am for never submitting this blog to any directory other than DMOZ. Maybe you don’t know what DMOZ is. Well, the pink pony salesman probably doesn’t either. He probably does not have thousands of incoming links pointing at his site, either. That is because most SEO fail at link building.
Real SEO Providers Eat Pink Ponies
I was talking to one of my SEO buddies yesterday as we dined on some pink pony burgers. He was telling me of a prospective client who came to him for search engine optimization. The man had a great product and wanted my pony munching friend to perform some search engine marketing for him. My friend, who had no reason to lie to me about this, told me he could make this guy’s product a smash hit. I mean, the way he described it, he could have sent this guys profits into orbit. A serious SEO guy knows when they can totally smash a market, by the way. We have research on our side.
My friend went on to tell me that after talking to this guy a bit, the potential client said he could spend $180 per month to sell his machines. Where in the heck did this guy get the figure of $180 and what kind of pink pony did this guy smoke? Seriously, a $180 per month budget to make a serious impact in his company’s profits? Is this really what people think we SEO people do? Do people really think that a person who can send their profit into orbit is going to live on minimum wage? Wow, so the one person who can truly make the biggest impact on company sales volume is worth all of $180 to the company?!
What really made us taste our partially digested pony burgers was that a lot of people think the same way. They have it in their head that there is some automated magical fix for marketing success. They think that the same thing that will work for a car dealer should work for an accident attorney, a construction company, and a real estate developer. The industry of Internet marketing has deteriorated into a pack of thieves who pick the bones of desperate companies who really so badly want to believe that there is one single magic pill they can buy over the counter and fix everything that ails them.
Those machines my buddy spoke about sell for a minimum of $14,000 and included a good profit margin, by the way. So, anyway, it kind of made us both gag on our pink pony burgers and face the fact that most people are really not ready to take their market seriously. They are not ready to push their marketing go button.
People Don’t Want the Truth: They Want Pink Ponies!
This all got me to realizing that people don’t really want to hear the truth. I have become pretty popular for telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. The crazy thing is that they may like to hear the real truth once in a while, but it is like watching a horror movie. It is like entertainment, but it could never happen in real life. Like Hollywood. They like hearing how their Internet marketing guy made millions of dollars conquering a market. What is sad about this is that the Internet marketers who actually have earned millions upon millions of dollars for themselves and their clients (yes, like me) are the guys you really don’t want to hear from, because we will pop the bubble you ride upon and give you the truth. We make fun of those guys. See … here I am in a video making fun of them, while subtly showing you that I am not full of pink pony poo and actually have been doing this successfully enough and long enough to buy a few toys of my own. Yeah, I didn’t do that selling pony poo … I did it making my clients a whole lot of profit!
Anybody who is tired of renting pink ponies and watching money slip away, what you really need is a pony slaying marketer. The presentation may be a bit crusty and abrasive for some people’s taste, but there is a reason serious pony killing search engine optimizers hang up the phone when people ask for a price before they even consider the real reason they called … the profit!
NOTE: If you like buying pink ponies, save us both the trouble and just drop me $180 per month in the mail. It will help me to cover my $1000 coffee expense while I work 25 hours per day to crush companies who try to compete with my clients.
Does Your Marketing Egg Look Like This?Have you ever asked yourself what it will take to double your business? Adjust this question to your business however you like, but you should always be able to answer the question. If you operate very small or new business, doubling it is a pretty easy task. If you have been around a while and have a significant market share in your industry, this may be a pretty lofty goal. If you want to be “realistic” (by the way, realism is very subjective), maybe you want to increase your business by 15 percent, 25 percent, or 35 percent. Whatever the number, ask yourself what it will take to achieve it, and set a course to do it. Make a goal and treat it like an egg. Keep it warm, keep it safe from harm, and nurture it every day.
Treat Your Business How You Want it to Hatch
Successful business people ask what it will take to grow their market. Successful companies, even the small ones, treat their business like it is a big one, and like it will eventually hatch into a huge one. This is a pretty important principle that drives many companies to massive success.
Lately it seems that many companies have given up on the hope of growth and just beg to keep the market they have. A shocking truth I often find is that many businesses have a lot more means to grow than they give themselves credit. Many of them are too backed up in bureaucracy and indecision to actually make the efforts it will take to achieve growth. Executives are so afraid of losing their jobs for making a bad decision that they make the worst decision of all, which is indecision.
Don’t Lose your Business in the Marketing Omelette
There is often a simple answer to increase your business, but finding that answer is the tricky part. A truth about businesses today is that as the economy changed quickly in the past couple years, marketing changed even faster. Marketing became more confusing, and companies have to be a lot more creative to reach those elusive customers. It seems insane to me that as competition is stronger, a lot of companies have either tried really hard at doing all the wrong things or just gave up to take a “wait and see” attitude toward their market. They gave up on their egg and are letting the competition come and peck away at it. They ran out of ideas, and stopped seeking that simple but elusive answer of how to keep growing.
Business Growth Requires Defined Efforts
Flight does not happen by accident, and if you ever want that egg to hatch and fly, you must take good care of it. Achieving business growth requires defined efforts and careful attention. Here is that question for you, again. What will it take to double your business? If you cannot answer this with a clearly defined plan for success, there are people who can help. It is my job to make companies successful. Ring me up at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) and I will be happy to help you in the right direction. If I am not the guy to help you, rest assured that I know people who will be delighted to work with you. I am always happy to pass along a referral. Most importantly, don’t give up on your egg and do something to nurture it every day. Success is likely a whole lot more achievable than you give yourself credit.
