How I Achieved Little Success From Working With The Best
Note: This article was originally posted on Medium.com as “Little Success From Working With The Best?”
For the past 4 years as a student at BYU Hawaii I’ve been working on different products and have really struggled to be profitable with them.
The frustrating part is that I’ve had really successful people who have been my mentors during all of this. Frustrating, because I have learned so many amazing things from them; they’re incredible people & entrepreneurs.
I figured if anyone would have a chance at succeeding in entrepreneurship it should be me! Their support and willingness to help me has been more than I could ever ask for.
Last night I was searching for answers as I usually do in trying to figure out this entrepreneurship thing. Again I was feeling so down and frustrated because I feel like I can’t get it together.
After many searches my last search query was “I’m a crappy marketer”. I’ve been coming to the conclusion for the last while that the lack of success I’ve been having must be attributed to my crappy marketing skills & wanted to see what I could find to help.
I found two articles in particular that were just what I was looking for. I learned so much from these articles and felt like it addressed exactly what I’ve been struggling with.
YOUR PRODUCT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH
The first article is called “You aren’t bad at marketing your product, Your product isn’t good enough!”
Ionut Neagu in this article talks about how people had been approaching him to get advice on how to build their business/sell their products and were complaining that they haven’t been able to figure out the marketing for their products. They believed the reason they aren’t finding success is because they lack the money and/or marketing skills to promote it.
He talks about how the lack of money or skills is not the problem but that the problem is with the quality of the product. He touches on 4 products that he has been successful with and how did it with little marketing. He says:
1.TRANSPARENCY REPORTS — WHY THEY WORKED
“To be completely honest with you, I haven’t spent more than a couple of hours promoting our transparency reports. Usually, I’m just submitting them to ManageWP.org, and sometimes asking a few people on Twitter to take a look.
Yet they still get mentioned at WordCamps, people talk about them on blogs, podcasts, and they have a really wide reach in the niche. Why? Certainly marketing isn’t the reason. I have spent waaay more hours/money trying to promote our other articles…
The answer is the content quality on its own… unique insights that can’t be found elsewhere and that actually help people with ‘something’ will always work, and will always come on top of other content that might not be so revealing.
2. ZERIF LITE — OUR MOST POPULAR FREE WORDPRESS THEME — WHAT HAS MADE IT
Before releasing Zerif Lite we already had 10+ themes launched, and I spent good money and time promoting all of those themes. However, when Zerif Lite landed, right from day 1 it generated 1,000% more sales and downloads than all of the previous themes combined!
At that point, it wasn’t that hard. I reached out to some popular blogs, insisted they listened, and at that moment I wasn’t afraid to pay for their attention and for having Zerif listed everywhere I could.
The theme was already way better than all the other free themes out there, so the promotion worked right away too. People started to write about it, it was much easier to promote it, and it felt a lot less like I was pushing it onto everybody. It all felt natural.
3. REVIVE OLD POST — WHAT MADE IT A MUST-HAVE PLUGIN
Revive Old Post is our top social media plugin. It takes your content and shares it automatically to your various social media channels. It has been in the WordPress.org repo for 4–5 years, and we only acquired it around 2 years ago.
The funny thing is that nobody does any marketing around it, yet EACH week (just Google it) there are blogs mentioning it, there are loads of people naming it their favorite plugin, and there are even videos on YouTube talking about it.
Let me emphasize on this again; we aren’t doing anything to promote this plugin directly at the time of writing this, it seems to promote itself.
Just like with the transparency reports, the idea and the way of approaching it is unique. It was the first plugin of its kind, it helps people, and it does it all for FREE.
Building a product that is unique and helpful, or that’s 10x better than anything else on the market isn’t easy, certainly. However, if you don’t consider yourself a genius marketer then this is what you should absolutely do!
4. WHAT MAKES BLOG POSTS VIRAL THESE DAYS
On the one hand, there’s so much noise that it’s really hard to surface with a new product/thing. But at the same time, if you build something that people consider amazing, almost no marketing is required, or the marketing work will become super easy.
If a guy who hasn’t written more than 20 articles in his lifetime can get his post viewed by 100,000+ people and with 0 marketing, then probably you can do it too.
Just focus on producing something awesome. And do it before you devote endless nights to promoting the thing…
There indeed are people out there who are marketing geniuses, or who have loads of resources that they are willing to invest even if the return isn’t coming for a while. But if you aren’t one of them, your best chance is to focus on your product first.
HOW TERRIBLE COPYWRITING SKILLS MADE ME A SOUGHT AFTER MARKETER
The 2nd and the last article I’ll mention here is from Bhavani Esapathi and is called “How my terrible copywriting skills made me a sought after Marketer” She says:
“Growing up, I hated the word marketing I began to slowly warm up to the idea of marketing as I got older and that’s not only because I needed money for food, shelter(etc.)….
With the rise of…social media I saw another world of marketing, one that wasn’t…reliant upon shoving stuff upon people who probably didn’t care that much. In fact, to me social media marketing is the very opposite of shoving stuff onto those who don’t need it, it’s about carefully weeding out the ones who don’t need it and the ones who do
I ventured into the fancy world of arts marketing…and as an entitled millennial, what do you mean I need an MBA to prove I know how to attract an audience? Doesn’t being raised by a technology qualify me somewhat as a birth right?
I soon realized how wrong I was, not only was I a bad marketer but a terrible one in the best of my days. What kept me going was this streak of brilliance between extravagant moments of failure, something I couldn’t quiet put my finger on.
After a good few years of being a miserable arts marketer who could deliver results with just as much odds as a kid in an arcade machine. I took it upon myself to find what bridges most of my successes. There must be a pattern that determines if one of my brilliant campaign or strategic ideas will take off or slowly disintegrate…
I realized that most of the copy I wrote were evidently very fake and unreal thereby proposing mistrust than anything. Note to self: do not try to sell something that you don’t genuinely believe in… If you don’t resonate for the company/product you’re working with then you’re not going to be able to portray genuine likeness which often comes from being true to your audiences so being real and comfortable was a big part of the things that I succeeded at…you’re better off finding someone who’s not only interested in you but unusually excited which makes them perfect to market your products and services.
…most industry-standard agency work demands strategic writing that can strip you of genuine emotions in an attempt to embed addictive ones.
Because I’m a writer attuned to my sensibilities, because I know what I like… I need to find the right thing to write about otherwise I might as well be pretending to transcribe Ancient Greek….
I consciously acknowledge the things I could never promote or blog about so if you think you’re a bad writer or a not-so-great marketer, you probably just haven’t found the thing that makes you a good one yet.
So the next time you’re stuck contemplating how to ‘market’ your work better ask yourself ‘why isn’t this work inspiring me enough to show off?’”
CONCLUSION:
Both of these articles have taught me a lot and am still letting it sink in.
For now, what stands out is to do what inspires you! Consciously acknowledge the things you could never promote or blog about or anything wouldn’t like doing, be honest with your self.
I’ve learned that when you are true to what inspires you, the quality in your products, blogs or whatever your goal might be will come through. I’ve learned to start with being true to the light that inspires you and then the marketing/selling part will come much easier.
I think with having this in mind, i’ll start on the right foot & have better success moving forward.
jacobvanloon
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