The best marketing tools in the world do you no good…if you don’t use them. There’s such a thing as getting better tools and furthering your education. There’s also such a thing as procrastination. Become intimately familiar with the difference.
It pays to work on yourself. And it pays to use the right tools for the job. But it also pays to just roll up your sleeves and get to work. I’ve been doing this long enough to see clients come and go over the years. They move from one “marketing system” to the next, trying to find the one that “works”. I’ve even had some go full circle. They’ll try 10 different website providers, come to me for a year or so and leave, off on their continued search for the holy grail. Then a couple years later, they’re back. Still searching. It’s such a shame.
Here’s the deal guys. What you have now…works. The stuff I sell also works. I honestly believe what I do is better, and I’m happy to give you my spiel any time. You know that. But it’s only better in certain ways. And it only works if you use it. Suffice to say there are pros and cons to everything.
Marketing has been around for as long as commerce has existed. And for as long as marketing has been around, there have been people getting rich and others trying to figure out the “secret” to what works. Guess what. The most successful marketers aren’t trying to find the secret. They know there isn’t one. They use a simple formula. If you want to call it a damn secret, then fine 🙂 Bottom line, here it is:
Learn Shit → Do Shit → Rinse and Repeat
In other words, successful marketers do these things:
- They don’t forget about STEP TWO (do shit)
- They put things into action.
- They get in gear.
- They don’t stay locked in learning mode.
- They know that no system works if you don’t work the system.
- They don’t buy stuff and let it sit on the shelf. They put it to work.
- When stuff doesn’t work out or when they make mistakes, they just pick the pieces up and keep going. That’s the ultimate learning process.
- They’re not afraid to make mistakes.
- They don’t LIKE making mistakes, but they’re willing to do so.
- They know the alternative to making mistakes and experiencing failures is a process of always nitpicking things, mitigating in a futile attempt to keep themselves from failing. Failure is in reality, the best teacher of all.
A bit of a rant today? Possibly 🙂 It’s something that has been coming up a lot in consulting lately, and anytime I see a trend I want to address it on the blog. No consultant, no marketing strategy or magic silver bullet shiny tool-of-the-month can ever work for us if we’re not willing to roll our sleeves up and get to work.
Thx Ben Garney for the rocking picture today 🙂
My company launched a managed web hosting service in 2011. When clients see what we charge for web hosting, I’m often asked why we charge so much. For the record, the pricing (although this is subject to change in the future of course…this is just a blog post), is as follows:
For the past several years, I’ve been doing an increasing amount of custom web design work. It seems there’s an insatiable appetite for custom design work. But there’s a problem. A big problem. And I’ve decided this needs to be addressed.
As a business owner, you want to spend your time in the most valuable places. It’s called leverage. It’s not a new concept, but it’s a very important one. So does social media for small business make sense? No. And…yes. Well dammit, it depends on what your goal is, so let’s get straight to it and settle the matter once and for all, shall we?
The fact is that we all judge books by their cover. We know we oughtn’t, but we do it anyway. Especially when it comes to the web. Let’s get straight to the point, shall we?