without an e

systematic marketing [10/15/2006 02:57:39]

There's a really cool internet marketing seminar up on google video now. Just search for "x10 seminar". There's a whole slew of presenters, some better than others. Some of the videos got cut off, but even so, there's about 10 solid hours of information.

One of the presenters is a guy named Perry Marshall. His focus is on direct marketing with google adwords. I bought his eBook, and it's really got me interested in adwords. I'd been burning about a hundred bucks a month on a versionhost campaign. It was getting clicks but not a lot of sales. That's still the case, but I slashed my bid prices and freed up a lot of money for some new campaigns.

For cornerhost, there over 500 advertisers competing for the keyword "web hosting", so I'm not getting much of a reaction there. Either I bid low and my ad doesn't show up, or I bid high and go broke.

Web hosting is a commodity. Having great service gets you word of mouth, but it doesn't help you one bit when you're trying to sell to strangers on google. All those people see are what you show them, and it's hard to make an impression when there are so many other people clamoring for that same person's attention.

Part of the direct marketing process is to change your ads around, and test different versions to see what works and what doesn't. (Bizarrely, Perry Marshall teaches this, and then, in one of his example sites, rails against Darwinian evolution.) Anyway, I'm happily evolving my web hosting ads, but I'm also looking for other approaches.

What I really want is a permission asset. Basically, that means a mailing list. For example, I have a relationship with my hosting customers and when I email them about cornerhost, it generally gets a good response. But if I sent that same email to random people, of course it would just be spam (so of course I don't do it!).

That's all well and good, but my mailing list is for people who are already customers. Once in a while I have an offer for them, like the lifetime hosting offer I finally rolled out this week. And I know I have some people reading this blog who aren't customers, so I can make an offer here: hey! If you've ever thought about signing up at cornerhost, now's the time! $475 gets you web hosting for life, and part of the proceeds are going to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society!

But. That's all ad hoc marketing. Or you could call it sales. Marketing should be systematic:

In other words, marketing acts like a funnel, or a pipeline. It's a series of dependent events. Which means there's always a constraint, and you can subject it to a process of ongoing improvement.

My nascent marketing process looks like this:

So there's no permission step. I can and will take the kaizen (incremental improvement) approach, and eventually I should be able to bring in a reliable stream of customers that way. But the permission system is really a kaikaku (radical improvement) change. Sorry for the jargon, but I'm just now seeing how all these concepts fit together.

So what am I talking about here? Well, mostly I'm thinking about writing tutorials. Maybe a five or seven or ten day email class on python. I could do that. In fact, I did exactly that with the webAppWorkshop. It's just messy and out of date, and I sent out the emails once, to everyone who had signed up, rather than creating a system that people could sign up for on demand.

This makes sense to me, because if I'm showing people how to make web stuff, and they get to know me, then when they decide they're ready to put something on the web, there's a good chance some of them will come to cornerhost.

That's not even really a new idea for me. The whole point of putting the workshop stuff online was to have it act as a marketing tool. What's new is that I can finally see exactly how it would lead to sales. I can see how to take the asset and turn it into a pipeline, with first contact through adwords at one end, and a signup much, much, later.

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