Taking the plunge!

When I started my first business, as is so often the case, I didn’t have much money to spend on anything.  Coming from the big budgets of a global corporation, it was quite a challenge to learn how to get maximum impact for minimum outlay!  I still get great satisfaction from finding a ‘good bargain’.

However, this frugality has also backfired on me and held my business back.

You see, I believed it was wrong to spend much on training to learn more about business.  But the free or low-cost seminars and workshops just left me increasingly frustrated because they didn’t give me the whole story!

I’d been following several very successful business owners whom I admired, hearing them tell about the importance of investing in their personal development, and that they spent as much as they could afford (sometimes even more than was comfortable) on hiring a coach and training.

At some point a couple of years ago, it dawned on me that my belief was actually holding me back from success.  It wasn’t a case of waiting until I could comfortably afford to invest in training at all!  The training had to be done first, and then the business would be more successful.  Not really a light bulb moment, more of a ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that before?’ moment!

All the time I was thinking small and penny pinching on my personal development, I was in effect saying that neither my business or I deserved more.

As soon as I took the plunge and started investing serious amounts of time and money in training and coaching for myself, that’s when I began attracting more business.  I was even able to get some of the training paid for under a government initiative!

Business is still growing, and I’m still investing in it!  Never again will I be a ‘cheap-skate’ because I now know that my business is worth the best.

Marketing Messages - Too Time Consuming?

I've just been trying to watch a series of training videos, the content of which is supposed to help me make a lot of money in my business. I got annoyed when they kept stopping and starting and then playing out of order (could that have been due to my frantic clicking?). Anyway, at that point I gave up and starting writing this post!

Only a few months ago, free audio and video downloads on the internet were far less commonplace than they are now. Advances in technology mean that just about anyone with a webcam and internet connection can make and upload videos (audios are even easier). These are an incredibly powerful marketing tool for small businesses – if they’re done right.

The internet marketing 'gurus' teach that you have to give away something that has high value when you want to promote your product or service. I certainly agree with that. Unfortunately there are many people who have a different idea of what constitutes high value.

It’s true that these preview audios and videos are getting longer (at least an hour). But what I’ve noticed is that the value of the content is shrinking and the amount of verbose ‘filler’ is expanding to fill the gap! At this point I should say that there are still some excellent and very generous providers of free information – but unfortunately they are becoming outnumbered by the poor content providers.

The problem is, for those of us looking to get an idea which provider’s program or product to invest in via these previews, we simply don’t have the time to watch or listen to all of them! Even if we wanted to!

Just as we have become increasingly selective in the newsletters we subscribe to, I believe we need to do the same with these latest marketing messages. The marketers who will succeed in attracting our attention are those who take the time and trouble to form a strong relationship with us - which they will only achieve by delivering consistently high value information.

What's your experience? And your opinion? Feel free to post your comments!