Lost Job Start Business

Imagine this, you have just learned the rules of poker and you are sitting at your first table.  Do you think it would be wise to bet on every hand? Will you learn anything from doing this or will you just go broke? Do you think that you could beat the more experienced players?

There’s only one thing that’s going to happen. Your chip stack will vanish quickly and you will be out of the game. Another thing that you definitely don’t do is go “all in” at the very start. This is a lot like marketing a new start-up.

A lot of start-up entrepreneurs make this mistake. Hey, even I did it. Thankfully I have learned my lesson. You see, the difference between marketing and gambling is that in marketing once you find a winner it will probably keep winning for a while to come. The trick is to find a winner without spending too much cash.

As a result, I think that paid advertising is the wrong place to start for a new business. You may as well take out your lighter and start burning cash.  You will run out of cash before you find a campaign that is profitable.  Leave this to Nike. They have enough money to do it. You don’t.

Instead, focus on marketing activities that you can do without spending cash. You could call potential key reference sites with your pitch. However, I wouldn’t do that at the very start. I would focus all my attention on building a global base of early adopters.  In other words, I would focus on the Internet.

It’s the perfect vehicle for new businesses. It’s free and you can reach people all over the world. You are a global business with a click of the mouse. However, the Internet requires a more thorough approach than most other marketing tactics.

See, you need to monitor everything. That’s the advantage of the Internet. You can test and measure almost anything. This information is essential for your marketing activities. I have noticed that too many start-up entrepreneurs don’t do nearly enough testing and measuring online. To me this is crazy.

Imagine this, you get people on your site for free. If you make one small change you can improve your conversion rate from 0.4% to 3%. That little improvement is probably the most significant event in your start-up’s history. You know that on average you are getting $250 for every 100 visitors.  Now, because you have a 3% conversion rate you can ramp up your Internet marketing activity.  In other words buy visitors (SEO is better in the long-term but it takes time. You get immediate traffic with PPC). Only do this when you have a conversion rate that gives you a profit after the advertising is paid for. For the following let’s assume that you use Google AdWords PPC.

So because  you know that you are getting $250 profit from every 100 visitors. You can spend $100 to get 100 visitors and still clear $150 on average. You can incrementally ramp this up. Imagine spending $100,000.

See you can now scale your business. Also, you can invest more in SEO and reduce your PPC spend. If you focus on one main marketing tactic like the Internet you can try enough things in that area to find out what works and what doesn’t. Once you have your website working as a marketing machine. You can then expand your activities outside the realm of the Internet.

Whatever tactics you decide to use in your start-up marketing campaign make sure that you can give them the dept required and not to scatter your resources too thinly.