Why your service or product must only be a small part of your business if you want to beat your competition

working from home

 

I knew I was wrong but just couldn’t shake the feeling.

When I first went full-time as a writer and online marketer I remember sitting at my desk with my new shiny PC, printer (not used one of those puppies for years) and phone line just waiting for the work to arrive.

Obviously I knew it didn’t work like that but the small excited part of me that was buzzing like a nun’s hobby about my new venture wanted the rest of the world to be so excited they’d call me up and want to commission a piece, or buy one of my ebooks.

Didn’t happen.

Was quite a shock when I realised that writing had just become a tiny 20% of my new business. The other 80% of me needed to become a salesman, copywriter, ad designer, website builder, payment button programmer, receptionist and tea lady.

I had to get out there and hustle.

You already know this if you work for yourself.

If you’re working from home for yourself then you’re no longer just a writer, artist, software developer, proof reader, website designer or internet affiliate.

For me, it wasn’t until I started to place equal importance on ALL the roles I had to undertake that things started to happen.

I can sit down and write the most perfect article, book or report that would help my readers immensely with their own businesses. It could be the best thing I’d ever written…and it doesn’t matter a jot if no one even knows it exists.

I’m sure out there is Ms Perfect Google Adwords Genius, who could create an Adwords campaign that would have eager traffic flowing to wherever I wanted it and could double my monthly income in a few days…

…but until I know who and where she is, I can’t hire her.

If you’re a freelancer or product creator you need to spend just as much time marketing your service or product as you did creating it in the first place.

Social media and consumer psychology expert Derek Halpern spends 20% of his time creating a product and then 80% of his time marketing it.

He says

“If you write a post that 1,000 people read, chances are there’s another 1,000,000 people in the world that could use that exact same article,”

Not doing this was detrimental to my business. It makes little sense to spend a long time defining or creating a product or service, doing a little half-hearted marketing then worrying because no one has bought it or hired you.

Congratulations – marketing, selling or touting for work is now the biggest part of your business!

Whether that involves getting commissioned to write something, driving traffic to your new website, getting hired to do SEO work or letting your market know about the new app or software you’ve developed, it has to be at least as important as your product or service itself.

Takes some getting used to but when you do implement this, you’ll have a big advantage over most of your competitors, because chances are they won’t be doing it.



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One response to “Why your service or product must only be a small part of your business if you want to beat your competition

  1. Completely agree Tony.

    Also applies to the people who launch a product or service and then after a couple of weeks they give up marketing it. If you’ve put tons of effort into creating it, then treat it like the real asset it is and keep marketing it in an evergreen way.

    Dale.

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