What does your daily quota look like?
There are infinite tasks in your business. Which 4 areas are most important to grow your sales?
When you break it down like that, it becomes pretty clear what you must do each day. What are your 4?
Mementum
Move with Meaning.
If I was starting a web design firm today
I would approach small, high-quality specialty shops with weak websites. Like this or this or this. And I’d offer some online craftsmanship that properly reflects their offline craftsmanship.
These shops deserve a high-class feel to their sites. That’s great for me showing my design prowess.
Their products cost a lot, so their customers have money. Maybe they have money for a website (that costs a lot)?
If generating referrals and a portfolio of interesting stuff is the goal, this is where I might start.
Reality Check
The research is from 2006, but the point is clear: people are getting less connected, not more.
How does your product provide the connections we know they’re yearning for?
Social Media Heroics
Even if you’re a small business, there’s some great insight to be gained from Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market. Marla was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Twitter.com/Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people. (Social Media Examiner)
(Emphasis NOT mine.) I love how the number of followers somehow makes the account a success. (Was it ever on the suggested user list? We know that skews things but translates little in terms of quality.) So beautifully misleading about what is truly important.
Just as importantly, there is no actual data in this article. Sure, it’s impossible to be wrong if there is nothing to judge, and that’s nice for the writer’s job security… but I fear how many small businessmen read fluff like this and then waste time joining Twitter with no plan in place.
Swiping Works
Turns out, designers swipe from past winners just like us copywriters do. And lo! It works.
Joel on Twitter
Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820. (Joel)
Bummed he’s no longer writing regularly. This is a spectacular passage to close the curtains with, though.
Impacting the first 15 minutes
I think there would be massive upside for any information marketer who implemented this, even if it was just an assistant emailing it out. Lord knows the industry needs all the trust-building it can get.
An Approach to Web Forms
I wonder how you could apply this to your ecommerce sites?
What is a Facebook fan worth?
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but look how many members this group has (and note the title):
(Click for larger.)
11,847 people attending an event whose description sends you here
Scams rule until you get caught.
(Click for larger.)
I suppose it goes without saying that the event creator’s profile is jawesome:
All of this is to say I’m still not convinced Facebook is a great place for most entrepreneurs to make money.
High and Low Risk Maneuvers
I have a rule: if the toilet seat is up, the phone remains in my pocket. I adhere to this with dogmatic loyalty.
The upside of checking that email or having fun scrolling to nothing in particular is just too small, and the downside far too great. Sure, the likelihood of catastrophe is small, but what if.
Is seeing that email 10 seconds sooner worth dunking your device?
It’s a high risk maneuver whose possible ROI is minuscule. There are other examples, like throwing that pillow to your buddy when his glass hookah is lit (Just walk it over, friend.)… or dropping all your dimes on some mildly useful idea that just might work, hoping it becomes the next big consumer web app.
On the other hand, there are low risk moves with huge possible returns. Talking to that girl next to you. Building a web app in a defined, existing market that HARK! you could charge someone $5 every month to continue using.
These low risk high return moves get far less publicity. They aren’t sexy.
But I bet if you spent your life on them, you’d come out much more successful.