Complete newbie

[kinsella7]

Hello, I joined the forum to better understand how to market my business.
I'm very focused on providing a valuable service/product to the customer and useful tools.
I'm slightly put off by tricks and misdirection and manipulation tactics, because I'm a softie, but I guess you need to be optimised and go in for the kill to be successful.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Hi, @kinsella7, thanks for joining us.

I'm slightly put off by tricks and misdirection and manipulation tactics, because I'm a softie, but I guess you need to be optimised and go in for the kill to be successful.

Same here. If you haven't seen our free Digital Strategy Crash Course, we heavily focus on the fundamentals there with a bend towards helping newbies understand HOW to think and not WHAT to think.

Tricks and all that only last so long before people share the tactics around and the loopholes get closed because the companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) get embarrassed by the manipulation and make it a priority to stop.

That's not really a business, it's just a hustle that you end up losing. You can make a lot of money doing that if you can keep finding the next loophole but I've never seen anyone be able to do that. It gets harder and harder as time goes on and the platforms you're manipulating mature. There's still SEO tricks, and new ones being developed out there. I know of a guy doing $1k an hour on what appears to be a pretty sustainable SEO trick for the time being.

The problem is, the tricks are to the point where they require as much, if not more, effort than running a regular sustainable business that'll carry you forever.

 

[kinsella7]

Thank you for replying. I've been on a Fake Guru expose kick on YouTube, and I'm guessing there are tons of them that sell a dark side version of your course for ONLY 1,997 - free knowledge you can find online, but with ridiculous claims of guaranteed success, no work, no investment in your business to start etc.

That crowd has left a really bad scammy connotation in my mind with anything to do with affiliate marketing, dropshipping and the like. I dare say "Make money online" "9 to 5 is for losers" "Work from anywhere" "Passive income" are all concepts associated with scams nowadays.

I would be completely lost without the course, haha. I'm working through it, taking tons of notes. It's incredibly valuable and I'm very gateful it exists. Plus, it has made me come up with ideas for businesses that haven't got anything to do with my original niche. Problems I can solve for users/customers/peasants(lol), in a mutually beneficial way.

Is thinking "build it and they will come" a bad way to think about this? Like, maybe in stead of creating something bigger, very high quality; you can make many lower quality websites in a shorter time, making more money? Maybe my main idea that I'm passionate about doesn't have enough of a market, for example. Research can't account for everything. But I don't want to dedicate my time to making lots of stuff I don't care about. Even if my main website/business fails, it would be a learning opportunity, experience.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Is thinking "build it and they will come" a bad way to think about this? Like, maybe in stead of creating something bigger, very high quality; you can make many lower quality websites in a shorter time, making more money? Maybe my main idea that I'm passionate about doesn't have enough of a market, for example. Research can't account for everything. But I don't want to dedicate my time to making lots of stuff I don't care about. Even if my main website/business fails, it would be a learning opportunity, experience.

Yes, it's a bad way to think about it. If you build it, they will not come if they don't know about it. If it's not of high quality and trust, Google won't tell them about it. So even if you want to not rely on Google, it has to be even better quality so your marketing and word of mouth works out.

As a newcomer, building several small projects at first can be beneficial only because it iterates you through the whole process several times, where you'll learn a lot fast. But small projects of lower quality have a low cap on what they can earn, too.

At the same time, your first project ever is not likely to be a homerun. There's a lot you don't know yet and a lot you may screw up. So definitely expect to fail some. As you've said, that's actually a learning opportunity.

Marketing is equal parts "what not to do". You do big campaigns and find out which demographics and keywords to not pursue. You trim out the bad and then double down on the good. SEO works the same way, just with a much slower feedback loop.

 

[kinsella7]

Ok, starting out I'll focus on not biting off more than I can chew. Smaller projects, but still something I believe in. Doing my best for them to work, but not expecting them to be wild successes. I definitely need to learn the ropes.