Entries from November 2009 ↓

In my previous post, I talked about the growing trend towards do-it-yourself in business.  With all these tools available, it’s easy for business owners to get distracted by how much money they could save and try to do everything themselves.  However, in some instances, it really is advantageous to hire an expert.  What follows are six reasons that you might want to hire an expert.  If after going through the list, you remain unconvinced, then chances are you can do it yourself.

1. Expertise

Okay, so this might seem blatantly obvious and ridiculous for being included, but oftentimes, we tend to forget that experts (real experts), actually do possess knowledge and expertise that the rest of us do not.  That’s how they became experts.  In some cases, you absolutely need that expertise.  Also, how much expertise you need is a function of the severity of the situation.  If I need to change the oil on my car, I can do that myself.  If I need to change the transmission on my car, I need an expert.

In the world of internet marketing, it’s no different.  You may be able to write pretty well, and you might be able to throw together a half-decent looking site using some free resources.  For many people that may be all they need.  However, if you really want to maximize the potential of your website, a good professional copywriter has the expertise necessary to write you copy that will sell.  You can write, but he is an expert at writing.

2. Time Savings

“Time is money.”  I have no idea where that quote came from, but its truth for any businessperson is undeniable.  Every hour you waste fiddling with your website, or your Adwords campaign, or your analytics reports, is an hour you’re not spending making the products that make you money.  Saving $2,000 on hiring a consultant is not savings if you could have spent the time you were using doing the consultant’s job making $5,000.

Not to mention that entrepreneurs work notoriously long hours, and sometimes, the money spent on an expert is worth it even if all it means is that you have a little more time for yourself, for your family and for your life outside of your business.

3. Money Savings

This might seem counter-intuitive, because you spend money on experts, so how can they save you money?  Well, if you’ve ever tried to do something yourself and screwed it up royally, then you understand.  A friend of mine once tried to save some cash by remodeling his bathroom himself.  He paid for the materials, but saved on labour, and he had the extra time on his hands to do the renovations.  All was going well, until in the course of remodeling, he burst a water pipe.  He had to hire a contractor to fix the resulting damage caused by flooding.  Total savings?  Negative.

The same thing can happen with your marketing.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can potentially waste thousands of dollars on ineffective advertising.  That’s not to say you can’t figure it out.  You can, but you have to accept the risk that something might go wrong, and that could cost you far more than hiring an expert would have cost you.

4. Learning Experience

Something I look for in any expert I hire is someone that is willing to share his experience and educate me while still doing the job I hired him for.  This is particularly great if you want to learn a new field or just further your knowledge in a certain field.  Perhaps you can learn enough that next time around you’ll feel comfortable doing the job yourself.  True, not everything can be taught in the course of a short relationship.  My mechanic just wasn’t willing to talk me through how he went about changing my transmission.  However, in small business marketing, where most experts fulfill a consultative role, their goal should be to help the client learn.

5. Benefiting from Connections

If you go to a foreign country on vacation, and you look like a tourist, it won’t take you long to feel like you’re getting screwed.  You always get the sense that there’s two prices.  One for the locals, and one for the tourists.  That’s because there is.  Dabbling in do-it-yourself is a lot like that.  When you venture into the world of internet marketing, you’re a tourist.  You will go to the tourist attractions, and you will pay more for less.

Hiring an expert is like getting a local guide.  He knows the lay of the land.  He knows where the best deals are.  He knows who to go to get a quality service, and who’s just going to rob you.  This knowledge, these connections and this network come from living and breathing the stuff that you’re just dabbling in.  When you hire an expert, you get to take advantage of all that.

6. Growing Your Own Network

You know all those connections and that network that your expert used to help you when you hired him?  Well, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to use some of those connections and part of that network even after the relationship with the expert is over.  In the world of business, the cliche is that who you know is as important as what you know.  By using experts, you get introductions to the right people who may be of service to you in the future.

To Hire or Not to Hire?

After going through the above list, what are your thoughts?  Do you still believe that experts are a waste of money?  Or would you never even consider undertaking a project in unfamiliar territory without the help of an expert? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Traditional advertising was pretty straightforward.  You decided where you wanted to advertise, decided what you wanted advertised, and then you paid someone to do it for you.  The nature of the media dictated that you needed to pay someone to do it for you, because business owners and entrepreneurs didn’t have the skill sets to create TV spots, or full-page magazine ads.  New technologies and new media are changing that.  Advertising is more self-serve than ever.  As a result, small business owners and entrepreneurs are doing more themselves, and saving money.

In all this excitement over the free advertising opportunities provided by the web, and social media, people often forget to factor in one cost: their own time.  Keeping up with a marketing strategy that involves blogging, posting on forums, checking Facebook, checking Twitter, running your own PPC ad campaigns, etc., can easily become a full-time, forty-plus hour per week job.

The fact is that while you’re running your marketing strategy, you’re not doing everything else that needs to get done in your business.  It’s easy to read blogs like mine and forget that there are other aspects to running a business than marketing.  You still need to create a product or service to sell.  You still need to keep track of the financials.  You still need to manage your supply chain.  So, while you’re spending all this time on web marketing, what else could you be doing?

Small business owners and entrepreneurs quickly find out when they start out that running your own business is easily more time consuming than working a full-time job, but what they often forget is that running your own business doesn’t mean that you need to do everything yourself, or that you have to do everything you think you do.

Before you jump into all these “free” forms of advertising with both feet, do a quick mental calculation.  How much is your time worth?  The best way to figure this out is to figure out how much you would pay yourself per hour for the work you do (sometimes, the hourly figure can be a little bit depressing, but bear with me).  Once you’ve figured out what your time is worth, figure out how much time you’re spending on running your “free” marketing.  Now, multiply what your time is worth by the number of hours you’re spending on marketing.  Suddenly, all these wonderful free forms of advertising aren’t so free.

Ask yourself if your time might not be better spent doing the things that you are actually making money from.  If you’re a plumber, maybe you can make a few more calls a week.  If you make custom furniture, maybe you can churn out a couple more pieces a month.  Remember that what makes your business is the product that you’re selling, and your expertise lies in that product, so focus on your area of expertise.

“But what about my marketing?” I can hear you asking.  “It’s not going to take care of itself.”

No, it’s not, but now that you know what it’s really costing you, maybe you should see if it might not be a wiser investment to use traditional media?  Or perhaps to hire a consultant or an agency?  It’s almost sacrilegious to suggest such things on the web where there’s an intrinsic virtue associated to “free”, but from a dollars and cents perspective they’re the logical course of action.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the real value of using an expert for your marketing needs.

What do you think?  Am I completely out to lunch?  Is there really no value to traditional media anymore and businesses should focus as much as possible on free media?  Let me know in the comments.

Folks, the post you’re about to read is a little different than the posts you usually see here.  It is longer, and rantier than anything I’ve ever posted here before. Despite that, I promise you that if you read it to the end, you will find a handful of intelligent sentences, and if you accept what I write, you will leave here smarter than the majority of the people in the “social media game.”  And if that isn’t enough, in this post, I’ll clearly spell out how to get thousands of followers on Twitter. Then I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do it.

Where this is coming from

A few days ago, I logged in to Twitter to see what was going on.  I caught a tweet by Chris Brogan.  The tweet said:

“The only thing numbers do are up your odds of offending someone.”

Chris has over 100,000 followers on Twitter, and I’ve called him “the closest thing to an expert” in social media I’ve seen. I want it to be clear that what follows is not meant to slam Chris.  I’ve read his book (affiliate link), and I think you should too.  He’s a smart guy, and by all accounts, a nice guy.  He knows what he’s talking about.  But when a guy who has built a career out of social media says something like that, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to think, “Numbers also helped you get on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.”

It’s fine, though. I know what Chris was saying. It’s not all about the numbers. What got me to react was Chris’ next retweet:

“Ideas? RT @remarkablogger: @chrisbrogan People with low numbers don’t believe that for one second. What to do?”

I don’t believe that for one second.  I’m sure this wasn’t Chris or Michael Martine’s (aka remarkablogger) intention, but this got me worked up.  The suggestion that everyone that has low follower numbers is just itching to find a way to get more followers is false. It’s not about the numbers. Chris knows that. Michael knows that. Even people with low follower numbers know that.

So where is this generalization that everyone is chasing big numbers coming from? Simple, it’s coming from all the “experts” and “gurus” that are pimping products and services to help you and your business increase your follower numbers on Twitter.

There are a lot of people out there selling products that promise to teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star.  The vast majority of them are trying to teach you how to get more followers on Twitter.  The same phenomenon goes on for Facebook fans, or MySpace friends, or LinkedIn connections.  Not only are these products a waste of money, they’re missing the point.

The people who are chasing numbers are the people who are doing it wrong.

Authenticity

Then I think about the people who are doing it right, like Chris, and how he’s teaching businesses to be authentic, to care about their audience, and to connect with them. The idea is to be totally transparent.  That can’t be wrong, can it?  That’s when I read a post by Naomi Dunford from Ittybiz, entitled: “Anti-Social Media: The Dark Side of Authenticity.”

If you stop reading this now, and go read what Naomi wrote, I’d probably be okay with that, because it’s that good.  If you’ve bookmarked the post and decided you’re going to go back to it later, here’s a quick summary.  Naomi writes about how a lot of the big guns in Social Media give advice about being authentic, but that we tend to forget that the big guns are usually advising big companies.  Big companies are impersonal by nature, so even when they’re being authentic, they don’t expose themselves to vulnerability the way small business owners, like herself, do.  For the small business owner, being open and authentic means you can get hurt, and this is something that small business owners need to keep in mind.

Naomi writes for an audience of really small businesses (hence “ittybiz”), and I write for slightly larger, small and medium-sized businesses, but I think the considerations are the same.  Even in a medium-sized business, if you’re really being authentic, you’re opening yourself up as a person, and that means that you’re opening yourself up to people taking stabs at you.  It’s bad enough when you’re a SMB and someone takes jabs at your product, that already feels personal.  But to take it one step further, and be truly authentic, and have people taking jabs at you as a person, takes a willingness to get hurt.

Connections

We should be transparent and authentic because that’s what people want from us, but when you’re transparent and authentic with thousands of people, you’re just asking to get slapped around.  But weh have to be authentic, and if we want to be successful, we need the numbers right? Even Naomi, in a recent post, talked about numbers being social proof.  Her argument is that as much as we would like to not care about numbers, whether we like it or not, they’re going to be used to measure our worth as experts, consultants, businesses, people.

We need the numbers, and we need the authenticity.  If we have both, we are eventually going to get beat up on, or as Chris put it in that first tweet, we’re going to offend someone.

So, what’s the answer?  Should we be slightly less authentic?  Should we give up on chasing the numbers in favour of protecting our fragile egos?

This is usually the part when you’re reading an article where the writer exclaims, “Neither!” and gives you some anti-climactic compromise between the two that will solve all your problems and allow you to have your cake and eat it too.  Sorry, not going to happen.  Instead, I’m going to tell you that you should do both.  Be less authentic, and forget about your number of followers, and you’ll be happier, and more successful.

The Problem With Counting Followers

I’m going to go ahead and do something that someone else should have done a long time ago (and maybe they have, but it just got lost in all the spam).  Remember all those products that I mentioned that teach you how to become a Twitter Super-Duper-Sexy-Guru-Rock Star, and get thousands of followers?  Well, I’m going to tell you what’s in those products, and how you too, can get thousands of followers, and I’m going to do it for free.

I am going to use Twitter as an example, but the same can be done with any social media platform. Ready?

Step 1. Create a Twitter account. Use your real name and a photo of yourself as an avatar. That makes you seem credible.

Step 2. Tweet interesting or useful links, primarily about the niche or industry where you want to develop your following.

Step 3. Use a directory like wefollow.com or Twitter Search to find people who are interested in your niche or industry, and follow them.

Step 4. Wait a couple of days. Most of the people you’ve followed will probably follow you back, either as a courtesy, or because you’ve been tweeting interesting/useful stuff.

Step 5. Use friendorfollow.com, or a similar service, to see who you followed that didn’t follow you back and unfollow them. When your following to follower ratio is too high, you look like a spammer.

Step 6. Intersperse some self-promotional tweets in with your other interesting/useful tweets, but always post at least 8 non-promotional tweets for every promotional tweet.

Step 7. Repeat steps 3 through 6, ad infinitum.

BONUS: Use a list like the Top-500-All-Follow-Back list.

Tada.  There you have it.  If you do this, even for just a couple of weeks, you’ll easily gain thousands of followers.  This information is not hard to figure out.  In fact, it’s obvious, and yet people are charging $100+ for it.

So, if this is so easy, and I know how to do it, why at time of this writing, do I not have over a thousand followers?  Because doing this misses the point!

Numbers are important, but the only thing I remember from my introductory quantitative methods class is this: numbers can be misleading.

The problem with focusing on the number of followers you have is that it’s not the right number to focus on.  Instead, you should focus on the total number of connections you have made – the total number of real relationships you have.

A few years ago, I got a Facebook friend request from a girl that I didn’t recognize.  Since my Facebook rule of thumb is that I will only friend someone that I actually know, I decided to check her out before accepting the request.  The first thing I noticed was that she wasn’t one of those spam accounts because her photo was too real (read: she didn’t look like a pin-up).  The second thing I noticed was that she had over 2,000 Facebook friends.  At the time, that was the most number of friends I had seen anyone have.  The third thing I noticed was that we had about 50 friends in common.  The fourth thing I noticed was that she had apparently gone to college with me.  I did not go to a big college. At this point, I was mildly perturbed.  All signs pointed to me knowing this girl, and yet I had no idea who she was.  So, I did what any normally obsessive compulsive would do, and I called a few friends of mine that we apparently had in common.

The result of my investigation was that I, in fact, did go to school with this girl, but didn’t really know her because she was a social shut-in.  She had no friends in school, but seemed to collect them on Facebook.  None of our “mutual” friends really knew her, they had just mechanically accepted the friend request when it came their way.  Aside from feeling sorry for the girl, I couldn’t help but feel like, she too, was missing the point.  She wasn’t using social media as a method of staying connected, or making new connections, she was just collecting “friends.”

Fast forward a few years, and that’s what people are doing with followers:  collecting them.  Well, guess what?  Collecting followers is not going to do anything to help your business, or your personal brand.

Coming to the Point

Social media is about networking and making connections.  Instead of focusing on accumulating tons of followers, you should focus on connecting with the ones you have.  Connections are important, because they’re the real value in social media.  People you connect with are the ones that ultimately end up being part of your tribe.  They are the ones who will introduce you to new opportunities.  Having tens of thousands of followers, and no connections is akin to walking into a conference, saying, “Hi my name’s Bob” to everyone and then leaving.  If you don’t delve further into that relationship, the introduction by itself is meaningless.

I don’t have a ton of followers on Twitter, a ton of friends on Facebook, or any other big number, but the people that I’ve met and connected with are more valuable to me than any random 10,000 followers.

I’ve been asked what my policy for following people back on Twitter is, because I do follow back a lot of people, but not everyone.  I follow people back who appear interesting, and who I can tell are interested in connecting. If your twitter stream doesn’t have a single @ in it, there’s a very small chance I’ll follow you.

The other reason that you should focus on making a few deep connections rather than simply trying to amass thousands of followers is that that’s just how humans are built.  Dunbar’s number theorizes that humans can really only process about 150 real relationships at any given time.  That means that once you’ve reached capacity, in order to make room for a new connection, you need to kick someone else out of your social circle.

This is where being less authentic comes in.  If you know that you can really only have 150 real relationships, shouldn’t you save your authenticity for those 150 individuals?  Maybe it’s time to be a little less candid with your 2,367 Twitter followers.  Instead, save your authenticity and your transparency for your real connections.

As Seth Godin is so fond of saying, if you find a few fiercely loyal connections, those people, those members of your tribe, will promote you to their friends, and thus begins that most sought after occurrence in business, the wave of word-of-mouth marketing.

Stop focusing on the number that gets displayed on the welcome page of your social network of choice, and start instead focusing on the number of real connections you’ve made.  Take the conversation beyond social media. Many of the connections I’ve made have started with a blog post, a comment, a tweet or a status update, and led to non-social media communication like e-mail, IM, or on a few occasions, actual phone calls. This is the place to get authentic. It’s where it matters, and it’s where it counts.

The biggest problem with accumulating tons of followers is that, usually, that’s where it ends.  Getting the follower is not the end, it’s the beginning. Now that you have that follower, it’s time for you to interact with him or her, and create a connection.  This simply can’t be done with thousands and thousands of followers.

The point is this: It’s about the people, not the media.

What do you think? Is it actually possible to connect with tens of thousands of people in an effective way? Is the social proof of big numbers more important than making the real connections? Is saving your authenticity for your real connections actually just being a wimp? Talk it out in the comments.

In the summer of my sixteenth year, I took a job with a company that painted houses.  Their schtick was that they would paint people’s houses for cheaper because they employed students to do the job.  I took the job because it paid a lot better than what I was making working part-time at Burger King, and I could think of worse ways to spend a summer than outdoors.  I didn’t realize at the time of sign up that at least half the job was going to door to door selling the company’s services.

That is how I accidentally landed a job as a door-to-door salesman.  While my career was extremely short lived, I learned a lot from that early experience that I’ve carried over into various jobs and careers since then.

1. There’s no such thing as a natural salesperson

Up until that point in my life, I had always believed that some people could sell, and others couldn’t.  I also believed that I fell in the latter camp.  I was not a big talker.  I didn’t like misleading people.  I didn’t like annoying people.  I didn’t like being rejected.  These were all things that I thought a salesperson had to be able to do.

The first night we canvassed a neighborhood, we went out in a team of five, plus a team leader. I was the youngest, the smallest and the least likely to be a natural salesperson.  A funny thing happened that night, though.  I made more sales than anyone in my team.  Not only that, at the end of the night, when our team leader called in our sales to the regional coordinator, I found out that I’d sold more than anyone in the region.  How could that have happened?

2. Talk slowly

The area we canvassed that night was a primarily French-speaking suburb of Montreal.  I am fluent in French.  However, most would agree that I speak more slowly than a native French speaker (note: only in Quebec could the speed at which I speak be considered slow). The result was that I was more deliberate and more expressive in delivering the sales pitch.

When you speak quickly, people assume that you’re trying to pull a fast one on them.  When you speak slowly and deliberately, they have the time to fully grasp what you’re saying.  If you’re delivering a good pitch, then you want people to pick up every nuance of it.

3. Don’t be over-confident

The typical image of a good salesperson is one of swaggering bravado.  Many of colleagues that night did that image justice.  I, on the other hand, was nervous.  My first attempt at pitching came out more as a plea than a pitch (I didn’t make that sale).  By the second pitch, I was more comfortable, but still not confident.  The result was that I met the clients on an equal footing.  I didn’t talk down to them.  I calmly explained the benefits of the service I was selling without bragging about how great it was.

Just as people are suspicious of fast-talkers, they are suspicious of cockiness.  Moreover, people don’t like cockiness.  They like genuineness.  Are you more likely to buy something from someone you like or someone you dislike?

4. Be personable

It only took me a few attempts before I was ad-libbing from the sales script.  The script was a great script.  It had obviously been refined through experience and by some savvy marketers.  However, if I’d stuck to the script, the people answering their doors would have only known the company, and not me.  Instead, I greeted them with a few details about myself.

By making the conversation personal, I made it harder for people to say no.  It’s a lot easier to say no to a faceless corporation than to say no to a person whom you know something about.  I didn’t tell these people my life story, but they learned enough about me to know who I was.

5. Listen

I spent longer at every single door than any one of my colleagues.  This was not because they were getting doors slammed in their face or because I was talking that slowly.  It was because I listened to every single person who opened the door.  I figured that if I was interrupting these people at home, and expected them to listen to me, the least I could do was listen to them.  I distinctly remember one gentleman who had had his house painted the previous summer by the company I was working for and had had a bad experience.  He railed on about lack of craftsmanship, as well the general lack of pride that youth take in their work.  I listened intently as he sermoned me.

The sale wasn’t going to happen, and I could have cut my losses and ended the conversation early, but instead I listened to every word.  Amidst exaggerations over the moral decrepitude of my generation, there were legitimate points and concerns that I was more well-prepared to address with later clients.

6. Earn trust

The key things that set me apart from my colleagues that night was that I earned more trust than they had.  I did this through all of the methods I mentioned above.  In essence, everything that I thought would make me a bad salesperson made me more trustworthy in the eyes of potential clients.  Building trust is the single best sales tool available.  If you have a customer’s trust, you can sell him anything.  The trick is to keep the customer’s trust, because if you really do sell him just anything, that trust won’t last long.

Other applications

Whether you run your own business, are an employee, work in sales, or work in any other field, sales skills are valuable.  I didn’t realize all of the above lessons that night while breaking sales records.  They became obvious to me years later as I pursued different careers and drew from these various skills.

So what happened to my illustrious door-to-door sales career?  Unfortunately, this story has an anti-climactic ending.  The night in question was a weeknight towards the end of the school semester.  To celebrate my great night, my colleagues took me to a bar for a few drinks.  So, at 2 am on a Wednesday night, an inebriated sixteen-year old rang his doorbell because he had lost his keys at the bar.  Thus ended the briefest door-to-door sales career in history.

What sales lessons have you learned in the course of your life experiences? Do you find sales experience equally applicable to other aspects of business? Have you ever had to leave a job because someone made the decision for you?

A good friend of mine wrote to me to bust my balls about not posting updates here more often. What was interesting about the note was the subject line. It read, “In need of some inspirational words…”

The purpose of this blog was never to inspire anyone. If anything, it’s a chronicle of my own quest for writing inspiration. Despite this, at least one person uses it as a source of inspiration. I’ve written before about alternative places to find inspiration, but now I realize that lists of places to find inspiration miss the point.

As a person interested in the creative process, I’m sure I’ve read hundreds of pieces on places to find inspiration. Most of them look very similar. Occasionally, I’ll find something in one of these lists that I hadn’t thought of, but more often than not, I read them and nod. Most creative types experience the same thing. They read these things about what they are supposed to do, and finish them realizing that they already knew it all. The reading isn’t really informative, it’s comforting. It’s reaffirmation.

In that sense, looking to writers and other creatives for a laundry list of places to find inspiration is useless. There is nowhere I can tell you to look that you won’t hear and think to yourself, “Duh.” The reason for this is that inspiration is everywhere, but it’s different for everyone. I read this blog and see a writer struggling with his own limitations. My friend reads this blog and sees inspiration. I never would have thought to tell someone to read this as a source of inspiration. Similarly, I can find inspiration in my breakfast, but I don’t think anyone has ever included “Your morning meal” in any list of sources of inspiration.

Inspiration is everywhere, and no one can tell you where to look for it. Be open to it and it will hit you. This doesn’t just apply to writers and artists, it applies to anyone who wants to think creatively. You can find the inspiration for the solution of a work problem in the most unlikely places, too. Open yourself up to new experiences – even if these experiences are things you never thought you’d do – and find your unlikely source of inspiration.

And stop reading those list posts. Nodding along never inspired anyone.