Hello everyone,
As part of my own personal education in the world of internet marketing, I read and watch a lot of material, and much of it is good, much is not so good, and once in a while I run across something that is just plain useful. This following ten-minute video by Perry Belcher is great because it puts the concepts of social media marketing very plainly and clearly. In specific - you cannot look at social media marketing as a way to make direct sales, because you will turn people off and have no effect. Instead, you have to look at social media marketing as making friends and gaining network - it's just like real life, only online.
Give the video a view, and please tell me what you think in the comments of the blog. I think it's pretty clear, but I'd love to see what everyone else thinks.
Hello, Joshua here.
I wanted to take a moment and report on an experience I had this week with a client that seriously kicked me in the behind and made me think long and hard about making sure that one's own house is in order, especially if one is a house-builder for others.
I'm sure everyone's heard the expression 'the cobbler's children have no shoes', and it describes the phenomenon that so often happens with service-oriented professions, where what you provide (and often with excellent quality) to others, you somehow fail to complete or fulfill for your own personal needs. Plumbers have leaky sinks, mechanics' cars don't run, house painters' houses are in need of a new coat, etc. On one level, this is totally understandable, because if you're in the business of doing service 'a', it's always more motivating to be doing that service for pay then doing it for free. Also, in most professions, you can get away with it.
Greetings and welcome, my fellow target shooters! It's been a while since we've paid attention to our own internal blog, and believe me, it is not for a lack of things to talk about. We've been jumping with new clients and new challenges, and I'd like to take a moment to reflect on what I am thankful about in our business and in our particular place and time.
Even on the heels of news on the worsening recession, threatening to become a depression, we are finding that people are still needing our services more than ever, and I think that this has a lot to do with our particular messaging, and that we are focusing our market on small-to-mid-size businesses that have a small budget, but understand the need for an effective web presence and an intelligently planned web marketing strategy. I am thankful to be positioned well, and to be able to help others find the right way to take advantage of a market that appears to be shrinking.
The truth is, that every market has its opportunties and its challenges, and the trick is to keep your eyes out for the advantages, and avoid the pack mentality that leads you along with the herd, instead of striking out and taking chances where others may fear to tread. This is especially true in down economies, as many are pulling themselves and their businesses out of markets in which they may feel over-extended, but truthfully, they may be leaving behind revenue that others (such as yourself) can locate and take advantage of. The real secret is to pick a genre and to specialize, and then, go one genre more specific. If you know quite a bit about birds, you might want to write an ebook on a specific subtype of bird (the hummingbird, for example), and in doing so, capture a small market by dominating it. Do this enough times, and you can create quite a nice revenue stream. Many make the mistake of thinking that by trying to appeal to a larger market, you will get more business, when this is exactly the opposite, especially in a down market. Tight competition in a popular space becomes even tighter, and a buyer's market drives down costs and favors the volume producers (large companies that can through scale, affort to make less per transaction, but make it up in numbers). Through super-specialization, you can dominate a smaller market, but grab a larger portion of the business in that market.
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