One of the newsletters I like to invest in is Tony Shepherds – I usually buy it 6 monthly in arrears when he puts it up for sale in the Warrior Forum. In the latest batch, he posed the question – ‘What would you do if you had $2,000 to invest in your business.’
I’ve curated a clip from the Newsletter, because I think that this is particularly good advice.
It has taken me 5 years to learn the ropes and I would have made money a lot faster online if I had received this advice (and believed it) 5 years ago. You will therefore readily understand why this struck a chord with me.
So bringing it down to the bottom line if I had $2,000 to invest in my business here’s what I’d do…
I’d get an auto-responder service, I’d create my own product but hire someone to write the copy and build the funnel (squeeze page and offer), and I’d get a link-tracking service to track everything.
I’d then hire a coach for as much time as I could afford to look the whole thing over and see what he thought.
I’d make changes and buy traffic depending on his recommendation.
This next part is important.
Some new marketers spend YEARS doing the above – building sites, creating products and messing about with software.
In short, setting up the techy bare bones of your business.
Building a business is NOT about building websites and creating products. It’s what happens once you’ve DONE that, which is REAL marketing.
In my view, the setting up of sites and products should all be accomplished in no longer than one month.
Yet some people spend years doing it and never get to the actual marketing stage.
And I think that’s what a business investment should be for – to get you up and running.
I’ve been creating authority blogs in various niches this month.
Did I build all the blogs manually, install the plugins, do the SEO, created the design and optimize the whole thing myself?
Course not.
I paid someone to do all that for me.
To get me to the point where all I have to do is now add the content myself, or hire a writer.
It’s the small stuff that defeats you, the technical hurdles that grind you down.
Getting past those, that’s what your investment capital is for.
Getting you to the point where you can actually start marketing, having ideas and making money!
What I have learnt is that you can acquire skills very cheaply – much more cheaply than trying to do everything yourself. If you are scaling a business, you simply do not have time to do it yourself – you need to hire in skills to help you.
That’s what a business is all about – coordinating and leveraging the skills and knowledge of others to produce a result for your customers.
I’m still not heeding this advice – today I installed Adobe After Effects onto my computer so I could make some cool video effects but at the time I was downloading the programme I was asking myself what the hell I was doing. It would be much more efficient to outsource shit like this.
The other thing that took a long time for me to understand is what is meant by ‘marketing’ because you tend to think that everything you do is marketing, including setting up your website and creating the product. In this context, marketing’ means the actual promotion of the product i.e. driving traffic, whether paid or free, to your offer and the processes you adopt i.e. whether the traffic is cold or has been warmed up beforehand. Also the script or copy you use to persuade your customer to optin and/or buy your offer.
As Tony says, the marketing stage is the key one – almost nobody will buy unless you get this part right, however good your product.
So if you were wondering what you would do if you had $2,000 to invest in your business, you could do a lot worse than taking Tony Shepherd’s advice in my opinion.