Growing your business with marketing, week 31: Eating elephants

This is Week 31 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week here and at the Marketing Mix blog.

One of the nice side effects of looking at my marketing on a day-to-day basis over a full year (and yes, having to report on it every week) has been the knowledge or understanding of how big projects get done when you’re a one-man band.

The answers are, of course, “more slowly than you’d like” and/or “more inefficiently than you’d think”—honestly, back when I was a full-timer, a million years ago, I complained all the time about the lumbering, cumbersome System and how it was constantly screwing things up and slowing things down with its inefficiencies and meetings and procedures. But when it’s just you and there’s no one else to blame or pass stuff onto, other weird inefficiencies just arise and take their place.

Two prime examples are on my mind right now, because they’re both marketing vehicles (when you get down to it, anyway) and they have both been taking forever and a day: my revised website and my (first) book.

Theoretically, none of the stuff that would have stopped me 10 or even five years ago is an issue now. I can write (which, theoretically, is required with both endeavors), I can code in WordPress and I can now self-publish via Lulu or Blurb or what have you.

But while some of the slow-downs come from from me just not finding (or making) the time to write and code and research Lulu/etc., far more of the stoppage I attribute to the confounding inability to see oneself as clearly as one can see someone else. I’ve joked more than once about how I need someone like me to work on…me! And it is a joke, but it isn’t, too: I have the chops to tackle any one of these jobs, but I lack the perspective I need to tackle them efficiently. I’ll write, then question it, then rewrite; I’ll tweak my design, then look at it, then muck about more.

Two things finally occurred to me a few months ago, when I had my existential crisis: I need help, and lots more than I initially figured on, to do a good job of putting my own best foot forward; and, as a purveyor of services (and hopefully someday, goods), I need to become more accustomed to investing time and money in other people’s.

I thought at this point it might be useful or at least illuminating to point out how I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is (if that’s the right phrase to use, here) over the past few months since making this discovery.

1. The Heart of Money teleclass*

I’ve written about Mark Silver’s amazing, transformative class over at communicatrix-dot-com, so I won’t belabor that here. I will add that this is one of those rare double-headers where I’ve invested both a significant (for me) amount of time and money, and where the collaborative component was at least as important as the material itself.

This class was so significant that, breaking with a business-lifetime self-initiated ban on affiliate marketing (other than Amazon, where I just gave up because the numbers are so puny and they make it so easy), I signed up to become an affiliate marketer for Heart of Business. I haven’t written up my formal policy (I think creating policies is a good idea for anyone endorsing stuff where there’s a potential payback involved), but for the foreseeable future I intend only to endorse products and services I’ve purchased and really loved. The Heart of Money teleclass is one of them, and while I haven’t done the self-study version that just went on sale, I will endorse it for people who have a DIY bent.

• Heart of Money teleclass (full version) + hour of one-on-one consulting = $495

2. Marketing for Nice People audio course**

Why would someone whose job is helping other people with their marketing pay for a course in marketing? Because you can always get better and because you are almost always missing something when it comes to adjusting your own stuff. Shrinks have shrinks, so why shouldn’t marketing people hire marketing people?

Sonia Simone and Naomi Dunford are both sharp as can be, and their audio course, Marketing for Nice People, was an object lesson in the right delivery of paid information. I got a ton of value out of this product, and will likely loop back again and again to revisit it and get more. (They give you, quite literally, hundreds upon hundreds of “tweaks” you can implement to improve your marketing.) Also, they are funny and nice, and the product was fun to listen to.

(I’m not an affiliate for these ladies, so you affiliate-averse can click away with impunity)

• Marketing for Nice People (closed as of this writing): $197

3. Business Website Assessment

I’ve been friends with Dawud Miracle for some time and have collaborated with him in the past when I was a graphic designer, but I’d never hired him until recently. His email offering a full website diagnostic from the perspective of a site’s usefulness as a business tool was just the right offer (and on sale, when I got it) at just the right time. It was thorough and comprehensive, including both a PDF summary of his findings and several screencast videos: really, really useful both for understanding and for enjoying (again, that personal touch of hearing Dawud while looking at him review the features of my site was a great value-add). And for what I see as a minimal investement, I now feel far better equipped to tackle #5 on this list.

(Again, I’m not an affiliate for Dawud. Full disclosure!)

• Business Website Assessment: $199

4. Website under-the-hood overhaul

This was the scariest thing for me to pull the ripcord on because it was the most expensive, and ironically (or not), it’s what got me into buying a lot more of these services and products. My current website is a mish-mosh of two lovely WordPress themes; unfortunately, while I was able to hack them together, the code under the hood is ganky and the elderly nature of the themes does not let me take advantage of all WordPress now has to offer (widgetizing, SEO capabilities, quick design changes, etc.).

I’d fallen in love with Thesis, the paid WordPress template, after installing and using it on this site. After poking around a bit on the Thesis community site, I found the awesome work of Jamie Varon, custom Thesis designer extraordinaire. If her work wasn’t enough to sell me, the extraordinary care with which she’s treated me would: we could all take a page from Jamie’s book. (Frankly, most of the people on this list freakin’ rock at customer service, which I think is no accident.)

• Upgrade to Thesis Developer status (so I can run multiple themes): $77
• Estimated cost to port WP site over to the Thesis theme (with a few extra goodies): $1500

I did join the Thesis Affiliate Program, too, since I use and believe in the product, so yeah, all of those links? They net me a few bucks if you click through and buy from them. Please do—it’s great, and I’ve been taking a loooot of classes and stuff lately.

5. Success Team!

The first rule of Success Team is that you do not talk about Success Team, so I won’t. All I’ll say is if you haven’t formed some kind of accountability or Master Mind or other support group, do it NOW. I have been easily 10x as productive since I joined almost two months ago, and the only investment is time. (Only…sheesh…)

• Success Team weekly accountability group: $0 (except for gasoline and snacks!)

Bonus Crap Product and Cautionary Tale for Marketers!

I’m including one mystery product I bought that had reasonably good content because the audio quality was so shoddy there’s no way I’d recommend it. I won’t call out this person in public, but I’m considering whether to bring it up privately, both because hey, 75 bucks is 75 bucks, and because I actually like and respect this person and think the product is doing them no good out in the marketplace. Honestly, I bought this one more to sample the person’s content than to learn from it, so it’s technically a reseach cost. But boy, what an education in how not to make a product.

Grand total I’ve spent on classes/etc. in past quarter (not including books and one mystery product): $2468

Yikes! That’s a lot of semolians, to be sure. And it’s questionable whether I’ve made it up in sales directly attributable to the learning I’ve gained (although to be fair, I haven’t made the website changes yet, which will incorporate a lot of stuff from several of these products, and which will likely have the biggest impact of all).

But I feel much more confident in the steps I’m taking to market myself. And maybe this will make you feel a lot more comfortable about the very modest investment of the Calendar and/or the workgroups Ilise is setting up (neither of which is an affiliate link, although I’m starting to wonder…). They are still baby steps, and I will be a long time eating this elephant, but at least I’ve got a little help doing it finally…

*******

*And yes, every one of these Heart of Money Home Study links is an affiliate link. So you know.
** I differentiate between “teleclass” and “audio course” because the former was live and interactive and the latter pre-recorded and made available weekly for download.

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