The last 2 weeks have been super crazy busy for new business. It happens every year after the kids have gone back to school. I wrote an article about this in the past.
This is why you are seeing about 2 weeks since I have last wrote.
I have been so busy, I have been working morning to night and even on the weekends. Holidays mean nothing anymore. In fact, I was working just this past labor day. Clients even commented on email saying they received an email from my on Monday.
In fact, I am writing this very post on a Saturday afternoon.
What I wanted to write about here is about how great it is to know how to advertise on the internet. I am not talking about paid advertising, but just the fact of having the ability to write a blog post, record my voice on a podcast or record a video.
This last 2 weeks, while meeting clients, my blog, videos and podcast came up. People kept commenting that they had read an article, watched a video or listened to my podcast.
While I know that I gain clients by the information I post, I sometimes cringe when people say they read, watched or listened to a particular piece of information I posted.
I mean I know people consume the information I create, it is just interesting to hear when people comment on it in the flesh.
When I write or record my videos or audio, I do so with the mentality that nobody is going to read or watch them. I guess this is my way of being able to just turn on the camera, hit record and say what comes out of my mouth.
I mean I do have a plan of what I want to say, I just don’t write a script or practice. Everything is just one take. And if I make a mistake, I will actually correct myself on the video and just keep going.
I think people like the rawness of what I do.
Anyways, the other point I wanted to make is that by having learned how to market my business online through a variety of different ways, It also gives me the freedom to get rid of unnecessary offline marketing methods.
When I first started this business 5 years ago, it was purely via blog posts and video that I marketed myself. And I did well.
Then, after about a year, I started doing more traditional marketing by adverting in magazines and mailers.
But what I found is that the return on investment was just not the same with offline marketing.
When i first started, I would literally write 10 articles a day on my blog and record as many videos as I could and upload them to my blog and Youtube.
This cost me nothing but my time. (which of course is valuable) but not when you don’t have clients.
But over the years, I realized I was spending about $5,000 per month on offline advertising. It started with just one magazine and then another, but somehow that became $5,000 per month in advertising costs.
The problem with this is that I was not getting at least $5,000 in return for the marketing dollars I was spending.
So this month, I cancelled all my offline advertising.
And I went back to the grass roots marketing that worked early on. Online marketing.
Guess how much I spend on online advertising? (aside from google adwords)
ZERO. Yep, zero, all it costs is my time, because I am the one that creates, uploads, records and does all the work. Yes, it took reading and learning how to do this over a period of several years, but it is now the most cost effective marketing strategy.
Besides the money issue, I also wanted to talk about the freedom online advertising gives you.
But instead of making this a super long post, I am going to write a separate article all together about this issue.
Talk to you tomorrow. (or in about 15 minutes)
Tim
