I’ve made tons of mistakes in marketing. These are the biggest:
- Trying to help instead of focusing on the negative – I used to think that nice guys finish last. I was right. As it turns out, negativity pays when it comes to marketing! Make your headlines negative. Don’t focus on solutions. Focus on problems.
- Trying to work with everyone who wants to work with me – It took me a long time to accept the fact that my target market is not everyone. Your target market also…is NOT everyone! As small business owners, learning to focus on a specific type of client or customer requires making some emotionally difficult decisions, but once you do things get so much easier, so much more profitable and so much more fun!
- Too many calls to action – when it comes to marketing, we often try to sell too much. We want to tell everyone everything we do. In reality, our customers’ attention is a valuable commodity, so let’s treat it as such. Don’t expect your customer to care about everything you do. You’ve got their attention for a few seconds. Tell them one specific thing. Connect with them on one specific point, and build from there. Making fewer calls to action gets you a more meaningful result.
- Not charging enough – I’ve raised my consulting fee several times, and business has not slowed. As it turns out, charging more (when you do it right) doesn’t cause you to lose business. It causes you to get better customers.
- Holding back valuable information – I used to feel that I should share some ideas only with people who pay me. You know, leave the crappy ideas on my site for free, but give the GOOD stuff to paying clients. As soon as I started giving everything away, something funny happened…I started getting more orders.
- Thinking quality content speaks for itself – as a blogger, I used to think great content was the key. All I needed to do was create great content for my blog and people would eventually catch on. Wrong. You need to spread the word. You need to market your blog. Great content is important. Marketing and networking are just as important.
- Not selling products – the idea of putting a product together and selling it was always really intimidating to me, so I stuck with selling consulting. That’s fine, but consulting is always a trade of dollars for hours. Products are leveraged. Put the time in once, and then you can simply sell it over and over again. After I created my first product, I learned it’s really not that hard, and the benefits are huge.
These 7 mistakes have cost me a LOT of time and money. They are easily avoidable, so I’ve put a report together that addresses each one specifically. It’s free. If you’re a subscriber of Dangerous Tactics, you should already have received a copy. If not, please let me know, and I’ll make sure you get one. If you’re not a subscriber of Dangerous Tactics, head on over and grab a copy of My 7 Horrible Marketing Mistakes. I think you’ll dig it.