| Doing what works | 556 comments |
 14 Jun 2009 @ 17:41I'm beginning to get a sense of it, but not much more. You need to measure your results, so that you can do more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn't work. Most of the internet marketing gurus are saying it, at least when they seem to speak honestly. You need to have metrics. If you put ads in AdWords, you need to try different ads, measure how well they do, so that you can get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones. One word might make all the difference. Same with websites or just about anything else. Some things work, some things don't work. In terms of selling stuff or getting people to visit a site or click on something. What it is that works or doesn't work usually isn't entirely obvious. Somebody with a lot of experience can give a good guess, but nobody really knows unless they test it. This is of course abundantly obvious to somebody who has built their success on doing stuff that works. But it isn't a sensibility that most people have. Which probably has to do with why they're not wealthy or successful. Many people start a business based on an idea of something they'd like to do, they invest a lot of time and money, and then hope for the best. And it is exactly this - blindly hoping for the best, while working hard - which doesn't work, unless one also is lucky. Much better to be pretty sure in advance that you're doing something that people want. Just recently I've been partner in a company that forgot to find out if its product was wanted. I was just doing the technical part, and the other partners were taking care of the marketing and financial parts, supposedly. But they had really just made something up for the business plan, and nobody had actually gone out and checked if real people wanted this kind of thing. And apparently they didn't. Afterwards I learned more about marketing and I was embarrassed to have gone along with it. It should be inimaginable to launch a company without having done a careful study of the market, and without having a plan of what positioning will work and which won't, knowing what people would pay, etc. If it is just a website that doesn't cost much, one can experiment, but if we're talking a company with financing and offices, etc, it is a particularly bad idea. At the same time I understand perfectly well how one can miss it, if one makes decision emotionaly, rather than based on numbers. I've never been good at playing the stock market and I've only tried a couple of time. What I would tend to do would be to buy stocks in companies I like and then I'd wish for them to do well. If they don't, I keep hoping. Eventually I might get really disappointed and give up the whole idea and decide that the stock market isn't for me. And, well, it isn't, if that's how I do it. People who do it well do it based on facts and numbers, not based on what they hope will happen. I think it is a shockingly small percentage of the population who actually follow a strategy of measuring what they do, consistently picking what works, getting rid of what doesn't work. The people who do so tend to be entrepreneurs. All self-made rich people are doing this, of course. But most people aren't. Many more people follow some strategy of hard work and loyalty and entitlement. You know, you've shown up and put in a good effort, so you deserve to be paid well for it. The only reason one can get away with that is that there are entrepreneurs who previoiusly have figured out how to generate value, and they need bodies to fill up positions in their companies. Those filler type of people will develop a certain mythology about what it takes to make money which has nothing to do with what actualy creates value. Writing a good resume, being noticed at meetings, working on being promoted, keeping your desk clean - of course none of that is really what makes the wheels turn. So, a simple secret is that to be really successful, one probably should measure what works and what doesn't, and how, and when, and how much. And make decisions based on what one learns. |