Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Starting a Business or Just Throwing Mud?
A fellow marketer told me the other day about a friend of his who did something scary. Years ago, he sold office and school supplies.

He took the usual approach. Whenever he had a chance, he added more products to his store.

It seemed, though, that the more products he added, the harder he worked. Yet his profits remained roughly the same.

Finally, he took a good look at his business -- what was working and what wasn't. What he found surprised him.

His hottest sellers were maps. And not just any maps, either. People were buying those little dashboard map books at a rate that he could barely keep them in stock.

So he did a very counter-intuitive thing. He dropped all of his products other than those map books. Instead of adding more products to give customers more choices, he cut back on products and focused on finding more customers who were looking for that one line of products.

His results were just the opposite of what he was used to. Instead of working harder and harder to keep profits the same, he found himself working no harder, but reaping far greater profits.

A lot of business owners wouldn't think of taking such a step. They take the same attitude that this business owner had started with. They think, "The more mud I throw against the wall, the more of it will stick." And I think the reason that we fall into that thinking is because, deep down, we don't believe that anything we focus on will work.

We figure that we need something outside of ourselves to "save us." We need some outside tool or strategy that will attract and win customers. If it relies on what we put into it of ourselves, we fear it will fail and we'll be to blame.

But, hey, if all we're doing is throwing mud against the wall and it doesn't stick, at least our failure isn't our fault. We tried, it's the mud that failed.

In reality, though, the only way to succeed is through the unique effort, knowledge, and passion that we bring to it. Those maps did well for him, but cutting back to just maps was probably pretty scary for that marketer.

He probably heard more than one person tell him he was crazy to move away from being a nice, generic store to a tight niche. He knew he would have to bring his whole knowledge, passion, and perseverance to making it take off. His success would all be on him -- not on the product.

But by making the choice to move away from throwing mud at a wall and bringing all those dabs of mud together and shaping it into a single, artistic sculpture, he finally had something that others would really want.
Jeff

Labels: entrepreneurship, motivation, start business

Are You Taking Advantage of Your Uniqueness in Your Business?
When my kids were young, I had to chuckle at their desire to conform to being different. I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids say, "I'm weird," as a badge of honor.

As kids, we aspire to be unique. But when we enter the business world, we tend to lose that.

We feel that if we don't fit in to the professional "norm" we'll fall behind everybody else. So our promotion becomes stilted and formal. We try to impress them with how "professional" we are.

It's crazy! Will people look at our formal, "businesslike" presentations and say, "Oooh! That person must be really smart! I want to do business with them!"

Of course not! But, having that nagging inner fear that if people really see us in our business, they'll reject us, we try to appear as something we mistakenly believe will impress others.

Someone told me once of a Realtor who has taken the opposite approach. She calls herself "The Pet Lover's Realtor."

Every picture of herself in her advertising shows her with her dog. She advertises in local pet magazines and newsletters. She takes out ads in the PET section of of her newspaper's classified section. She's in the local parenting magazines, always with her dog.

Guess which Realtor is the biggest seller in that city. That's right: "The Pet Lover's Realtor."

Rather than hiding behind some mask of professionalism, she embraces who she is, what she loves. And like-minded people flock to her to do business with her.

Take some time to look at yourself, who you are, what makes you unique. Look for ways to use it in your marketing. Let people see the real person behind the business. You might be surprised what it can do.

Labels: entrepreneurship, marketing, mindset

Does This Mean I've Crossed Over to the Dark Side?
I get a lot of biz op junk mail. I don't know whether me being involved with Internet marketing gets me more than most people or not.

I know, though, that I get a lot of invitations to "free" seminars that are merely veiled pitches for $2,500 business-in-a-box programs that sell people a site-building tool that they'll never use because it's too complicated for anyone but the developer to understand.

The other biz-op scam I receive a lot sent me another (very elegant looking) pitch today. It's the old "have a business of your own by servicing vending machines!" scam. There must be a lot of money in getting people to sign up to service vending machines, because the mail I get for this biz-op is staggering.

It ticks me off every time I get one of these biz-op mailings because I know that people, who desperately would like to experience the freedom of making a living off of their own business, will take the scammers up on these "opportunities" and get burned.

I didn't throw that piece of mail out today like I usually do, though. A delicious idea crossed my mind.

I thought, why not save up all this deceitful biz-op junk mail for a month or so and then do a short video showing the accumulated pile. I could then decry the predatory biz-op schemes out there and contrast them to the low-cost legitimate business training that I provide on Employee-to-Entrepreneur Blueprint?

The idea of using a pile of scam mail to show the worthless scams that prospective business owners fall victim to seemed too delicious to pass up. "Let 'em send me junk mail," I thought. "I'll just use it to make my point about how much worthless junk is out there."

You know what this means, though, don't you? I am now officially SAVING junk mail. I've already saved a few sales letters that were exceptionally well written so I could get ideas from them when I write sales letters. But now I'm even saving junk mail scams!

My mentors always told me that the day would come when I would stop looking at ads as an irritation and start seeing them as opportunities to learn lessons -- good or bad -- from other marketers. I guess that day has now officially come.

I don't know if that means I've crossed over to the dark side, though. That would be if I started scamming, or at least focused on methods that others would find intrusive.

I look at it as becoming a better marketer: seeing opportunities where others see trash, learning to avoid intrusive techniques and make my messages more focused on customer needs.

I don't think I've crossed over to the dark side. I'm just seeing a bigger picture in my chosen field.
Jeff

Labels: entrepreneurship, marketing

Why an Employee Mindset Dooms Marketing
I think a lot of us look at marketing tasks from an employee mindset -- complete the task and receive a reward, regardless of what completing the task achieved.

That leads to the tendency to to do those tasks just for the sake of doing them and bailing out when when we don't see immediate compensation for our efforts.

It also leads to the failure to measure results, and the unwillingness to tweak and improve, that is essential to growing a business.

If we see marketing as a task for which we expect compensation simply because we put some time into it, we'll never see any benefits.

If, instead, we start by defining the results we want and then focus on getting the output of our efforts to match the results we seek, we'll start to see real benefits from those efforts.
Jeff

Labels: entrepreneurship, marketing

The Two Biggest Problems with Being Your Own Boss
Lots of people make a mad dash for a work-at-home existence, thinking it will be an absolute utopia. But once they start sitting at home every day, they start to realize how many positives from the workplace they need to replace.

The two that hit me especially hard were structure and interaction.

With the lack of a structured quitting time to focus me on getting things done, I found it easy to divide my focus between the task at hand and a half-dozen other future options that I should have filed away as separate projects, each with their own designated times and focus. That was what led me to 12-hour-a-day, 7-day work weeks (with me usually accomplishing less than I had accomplished in the office in a 40-hour week).

The lack of interaction was probably even a bigger killer. If you're the only one expressing an opinion on your ideas, you always get exactly what you want.

The problem is that you never get anything better than what you want. Bouncing an idea off of someone else and seeing them validate it as a good one frees you from that nagging doubt that maybe there's a better way of doing this.

Similarly, bouncing an idea off someone else and having them bounce back an even BETTER idea puts you that much further ahead in your work.

I almost chucked it all and went back to the confines of the office just to get that interaction back. Fortunately, I found like-minded people to interact with online.

Never go it alone when you work at home! You need human interaction in your business, even if you're a lifelong introvert like me.

There are many more elements of a 40-hour, on-the-job work experience that you need to consider when you make the jump from employee to entrepreneur. These two are two of the biggest, though.
Jeff

Labels: entrepreneurship, start business

Certainty vs. Real World Entrepreneurship
I just got an email from Google AdWords guru Perry Marshall in which he told an entertaining story about a homework assignment he received in college.

The professor assigned a problem that was utterly unsolvable -- unless you compared notes with other students, asked advice from other professors, and eventually found your way to some obscure computer program on some obscure computer in the depths of some obscure research lab way across campus.

The next day, Perry really let the prof have it. How dare that professor give them a problem without first telling them how to solve it. The professor shrugged Perry off.

It took years of real-world experience before Perry finally realized that that assignment had had a more important point to it than just returning the correct answer. The professor was teaching them an important lesson about life.

Perry puts it this way:

"The good news is: Business is an OPEN BOOK test where nobody tells you which book you might happen to need today.

"All you know is: The more things you've seen and the more books you have at your fingertips, the faster you can solve the problem, run through the maze, ring the bell and get the cheese...

"In the Dilbert Cube and the classroom, they give you 100% of the answers in advance and they expect you to do 100% of what they tell you to do. If you do it correctly, you get a grade of 100%...

"In the entrepreneurial world, you get maybe 30% of the answers in advance. And because you assume from the outset that only one third of the things you try are going to work, you need to do 300% of what you're told to do."

If you like everything neatly defined for you, maybe entrepreneurship is not where you want to be.

When you start your own business, you leave behind the certainty you had as an employee. I'm not talking just about the guaranteed paycheck and benefits, though.

When you start your own business, nobody is responsible for giving you all the answers in advance. Finding the answers even when you don't know where to start is your job now.

When you're an employee, someone else takes responsibility for making sure you have the resources you need. Someone else takes responsibility for figuring out what you need to do and when you need to have it done to keep everyone's work flowing smoothly. Someone else ventures out to deal with all the uncertainties that you never even become aware of.

That person takes the risk. That person tackles the unknown. That's why the person at the top gets paid the big bucks.

When you start your own business, YOU are that person. That means taking responsibilities you never dreamed of as an employee. Are you ready for that role?
Jeff


P.S. Thought-provoking emails like the one from which I took just a small snippet are part of the reason I belong to Perry Marshall's Renaissance Club. If you're ready to take building an entrepreneur's mindset seriously, I encourage you to check it out.

As a member, you receive Perry's classic Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, no-holds-barred emails on all sorts of topics related to entrepreneurship, a top-flight monthly newsletter, and a WHOLE PILE of resources on all phases of building businesses.

If what he said connected with you at all, check out Perry's Renaissance Club. He's always good for giving a clear view of life outside what he calls "the Dilbert Cube."

Labels: entrepreneurship, mindset, Perry Marshall, personal growth, start business