Why My Business Failed And The Greatest Marketing Lesson I've Ever Learned
by Ryan McMullen
About eight years ago, I started my first business with a total marketing budget of $0. When starting a business, you typically have either time or money, and I had the former in spades.
The business idea was pretty simple. I was going to sell other people’s products on my website. If somebody was looking for widgets online, they would find my website and I would sell them all the widgets they could handle. I had manufacturing partners, so I didn’t have to produce any products, nor did I have to fulfill any orders. My site linked directly to the manufacturers’, and they paid me a commission.
I knew I could make up for my lack of funding with hard work by teaching myself every marketing tactic the Internet had to offer. I learned how to build my own website, how to optimize it so that Google would rank me high in its search engine, how to create an email list, how to blog, how to write articles and press releases, how to contribute to forums; the list goes on and on.
As you’ve certainly figured out based on the headline of this column, I failed miserably. You would think that armed with all of that knowledge, I would have been printing money, right?
There is no doubt in my mind that had I known then what I know now, that first business would have been successful. What should have been obvious to me then, what seems like common sense to me now and where most unsuccessful marketing campaigns go wrong is simple: I didn’t stick with it.
I was just getting started, was desperate to earn an income and needed to see results immediately. When I didn’t see my website shoot up the Google rankings, I said, “SEO is BS, and it doesn’t work.” After writing 50-plus articles, publishing them online and seeing only pedestrian results, I decided that article marketing doesn’t work. Over and over, I would learn about the next greatest tactic, immediately implement it, then stop doing it if I didn’t become an overnight millionaire. I did not stick with anything, and I learned that very painful lesson.
If there is one parcel of wisdom I can impart to any business when it comes to marketing, it is to stick with something. I don’t care if you’re talking about radio, billboards, TV or online marketing. If you do it long enough, it will work. For each medium you can think of, there is a business that has earned its stripes doing it. There’s a reason that Meramec Caverns has 10,000 billboards – they work for it!
Obviously some strategies work better than others, but until you stick with something long enough to see results, you’ll never know and you’ll just keep searching for that magic bullet that doesn’t exist.
Ryan McMullen (ryan@stlouismarketinglab.com) is the owner of St. Louis Marketing Lab.