We’ve been exploring concepts that are important to understand before jumping on the online marketing bandwagon. We’ve looked at two already – why the secret to online marketing is offline and why you should focus on just one thing. We’ll add two more today.
The first is “Do It Wrong Quickly.”
This is the title of a good online marketing book written by Mike Moran (although it’s written more for those in large companies than small business owners).
It’s also is a great phrase that quickly and clearly describes this important concept.
The web allows you to test, sometimes in a matter of hours, how well your marketing strategy is working. Faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before you can see exactly what’s getting the desired response and what isn’t.
The key is to start small and don’t sink most of your marketing budget into a surefire, slam dunk marketing plan that you and/or some marketing consultant came up with. Because it doesn’t matter how great you think the plan is, it only matters what your prospects think. And it’s amazing how frequently what you think and what they think don’t mesh.
So the get it wrong quickly concept is this: start small, see what works, quickly get rid of what doesn’t work, quickly build on what does.
And that leads nicely to the second concept in our 2-for-1 special.
It’s the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule. This rule basically states the 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.
To give an example from the world of online marketing – in AdWords you’ll see that 80% (or likely much more) of your results come from 20% of your keywords.
Another example is that you’ll find 80% (again, probably much more) of your video traffic comes from YouTube. The 80/20 rule dictates that it’s not worth posting your videos on every other little video sharing site because the additional traffic you’ll generate won’t be worth the investment of your time.
Let’s put these two concepts together now.
As you “do it wrong quickly” you’ll start finding that some of the things your try work very well – whether they be keywords, Google ads, SEO, article marketing, video marketing, etc.
As you find the ones that work, focus your attention on them.
Optimize them. Refine them. Test them.
You’ll be much more efficient and productive by focusing your attention on the 20% (or 10% or even 1%) of the things that are producing 80% (or 90% or 99%) of the results instead wasting your time on the 80% of things that will only drive 20% of your results.
There are 1000s of ways you can drive traffic to your website and build your online business. You can’t possibly use them all (at least not without a large staff anyway).
So throw some spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Then quickly focus 80% or more of your efforts on the ones that do and build your internet empire from there!
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