An Idea Is Not A Plan
Ideas are the birth places of all great businesses, the more the better I always say.But an idea written down on a piece of napkin, or a simple sitemap you’ve drawn in excel does not constitute a plan.
I recently had a meeting with some prospects who wanted to do a website, quite a large one and with quite a good idea behind it too, but I noticed something which, without having experienced it myself, I may not have known if I was in their position.
They did not have a detailed enough plan/ strategy.
They had a general idea of what to do and how they wanted their website to work, but it wasn’t specific enough.
It must have been the strangest thing hearing a web designer you might want to hire pick at the weaknesses of their idea and overall strategy.
But like I said to them, I was you, I did the same thing and here’s how I would have done it better.
Identify Where Your Revenue Will Come From
With my first major project, I was convinced the money would rain from the sky, that my target audience would willingly open their cheque books, sign their name and let me fill in the rest.But this is planet earth, money doesn’t grow on trees, in fact money was in low supply from the businesses who I thought would invest in my maiden idea.
I never really thought, hey, if I was them, would I invest in this website, is it something I would normally do?
And the simple answer was NO, it’s not something I would invest in.
It wasn’t because my website didn’t have something to offer, in fact in terms of publicity and traffic, we got much more than you would expect in our first year, it’s just that the people we were targeting were not ready to spend money on an online portal just yet.
But by this point, it’s hard to change the ‘feel’ and branding of your site to target it to other segments who might have the money to spend.
It’s not impossible, it’s just it’ll take more time, resources and even more money to move it in the direction it should have started with in the first place.
So make it easier on yourself, start by walking in the right direction and you’ll definitely get where you want to go much faster.
‘Spreading The Word’ Is Much Harder Than You Think
Another one of my first mistakes was thinking that marketing was going to be a breeze, that once people heard of my brand new site, word of mouth would do the rest.Well with some restaurants in Malaysia, that definitely is the case, but with a website, you’ll have to do a bit more.
The highest source of traffic we received when we first started was from our friends and through Facebook.
We put the link of every new post we published onto Facebook and we asked our friends to tell other people about it.
But there’s only so much that your friends can do, unless your site is something really special, or maybe you have 5000 friends (well then you wouldn’t really need my advice on marketing would you?) there’ll come a point when the traffic will start to plateau out.
It’s at this point you’ll want to move on to plan B of your marketing strategy, maybe it’s online advertising, maybe it’s guest posting, maybe it’s article writing.
What plan B I heard you say?
Before you begin, you must think of your marketing plan, how much it will cost you, what are the best avenues to reach your target audience and many other things.
Too often, people think (myself included) that the product is good enough that it’ll market itself, which is probably what leads to many new blogs and website shutting down much faster than they should have.
Marketing, marketing, marketing. It’s so important I had to say it 3 times.
Willy, I thank you again of what you have thought me during the course,
Aisyah....30th June '10
