Marketing

The following posts are hopefully related to "Marketing" in some way.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008, 7:09pm

How Do I Manage Growth at Snowdrop?

Snowdrop is running into a pretty cool problem: too much work.  I never really gave much thought to the idea that Snowdrop could eventually have too much work spread over too many projects, but after putting in 98 and 107 hours each of the last two weeks, respectively, I realized it’s time to start managing growth a little better.

To do this I’ll actively try two new things:

  1. Value My Time A Little More - Colleagues at work always ride me for charging too little, so from now on I will make a better effort to charge for value, not for time.  Through this I’ll probably piss off a few more people, but the clients I do take will be much more valuable.
  2. Ask For Help - If there are several interesting or profitable projects running in parallel, I’ll turn to colleagues, outsourcing websites, and other outlets to offload and share work.  I’ve already started to do this and it has worked out well so far.

May will be Snowdrop’s biggest month ever in terms of profit and revenue.  Since the beginning of the year, business has grown almost 300%, but to maintain that type of growth we need to be smart about our decisions.

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Wednesday, January 9, 2008, 6:37am

Sell the Concept, Then Yourself

As I’m sitting here trying to decide exactly when I’ll pull the trigger over at MacHeist, I’m reflecting on a conversation I had last night with a local business owner.  Now I have very little experience in direct (face-to-face) sales, and the purpose of this meeting was to bring his restaurant’s website over to Snowdrop.  While I felt I had a strong sales pitch and a nice angle, I quickly realized selling Snowdrop wasn’t going to be the difficult part. In fact, the owner liked the idea of Snowdrop being a small startup in the area.

The difficulty, it would turn out, was convincing him that a website in itself would help his business. (more…)

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Friday, January 4, 2008, 6:16am

You Are Always Marketing

Freelance Switch has a great article on how to market your business like a pro and one of the points it mentions is that as a freelancer, you are always marketing yourself.

…even when you are not. Your personality, dress, and attitude speak volumes about your business. As a freelancer, this becomes dually important because often you are the business.

As I mentioned in my last post on LinkedIn, you can land more freelancing projects just by connecting with people two or three degrees away from you in your network. By always working hard and consistently producing high quality results, no matter how small or unimportant you think the project may be, you’ll always expand your network and open yourself up for even more opportunities.

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Sunday, December 30, 2007, 2:56pm

Turn Customers into Evangelists

Guy Kawasaki lists this as one of “8 Ways to ‘Bring It’” in his article for Entrepreneur.com.  He says:

There are few things that drive a competitor crazier than an unpaid, thunderlizard group of customers who become evangelists for a company. Create a great product or service, put it out there (”let a hundred flowers blossom”), see who falls in love with it, open up your arms to them (they will come running to you), and then take care of them. It’s that simple.

This is exactly what elevated Apple to its current position in the computer and portable device markets.  If you spend more time (and possibly money) to put out a quality product, you’ll save much more in advertising dollars by relying on your customers to spread the word.

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Sunday, December 30, 2007, 9:41am

Becoming a Personal Coach

Small Business Trends has a good post on the Top Ten Opportunities in 2008 for Personal Businesses, #4 of which is “Business and Personal Coaching”.  This is a very interesting (and lucrative) opportunity for those with knowledge of a particular industry, marketing gurus, and other entrepreneurial spirits.  Some personal coaches charge $200+/hour and get it without negotiation - it all has to do with your reputation in the area.  Business Week remarks that blogs are a fantastic way to build exactly that kind of reputation, and with a successful blog you could catapult your career into whatever direction you’d like.  Powerful stuff, no?

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