Steve Mills – Online Marketing

Like many entrepreneurs, I knew from an early age that I wanted to work for myself. I saw my Dad start to build his business up from scratch during my early teenage years, and this was a big inspiration to me. He was stuck in a 9-5 that he didn’t really enjoy, and kept him away from the house for long hours during the week. I had a number of small money making ventures through high school (as well as heaps of holiday jobs, which is another blog post unto itself), but I remember deciding in my first year of University that I was going to own and run my own company one day. I made the decision one day after much thought to start a couple of businesses once (call me crazy) to test the waters and see where the demand was.

Back in 1997 I was working for the local pizza shop, the late nights driving around pizza for minimum wage, using my own money for petrol was looking less and less attractive as the weeks wore on. That, and also the fact that my car, clothes and even myself started smelling like burnt mozzarella and tomato paste. It was time to make a change, so that’s what I did.

The two businesses that I started were IT Support / Tutoring, and then in addition a Web Design business. I had the skills and expertise for both, and was moderately good with people so the customer service aspect came naturally to me. In fact to this day, I would recommend that young people in or just out of high school with moderately good computer skills give one of those business models a go just to wet their ears in the business game. Do it while the stakes are low and you can afford to fail. Failure in business should not be seen as a sign of weakness, but of a valuable lesson learnt.

Both of these business models have incredibly low outlay, but also a low barrier to entry which makes them a great training ground to get the fundamentals down. It is however a hard long term proposition to build a significant business around these models without radically ups calling the business or knowing about outsourcing. For my 18- 19 year old brain, it took a while to get my head around those concepts, and the marketplace soon caught up with big players moving into town.

The two businesses started off quite successfully, due more to incredible market demand at that time, and I worked really hard to get the first clients through the door. I started up volunteering for a couple of local community websites, made friends with a few local traders and business groups and spoke at their meetings. I also placed fliers up on some local message boards at the supermarket and in shop windows. Business started to do well, although i was massively undercharging for my time.

As time went on, I faced all of the challenges that a solo entrepreneur in a new field will come across. Offline business that are time dependent and not set up correctly from the outset are hard to grow, and hard to acquire new customers once you get to a certain level of being ‘flat out’ busy. I was young, and because I was not really charging a huge amount for my services it was hard to employ others and still maintain any level of profitability. I was also getting tied up in client management, non paying clients and very long sales cycles which put pressures on cash flow. Juggling all of this with full time University studies taught me some great time management skills, but also the importance of knowing when to concentrate your resources on the most effective course of action. Something had to give…

The Service / Tutoring business was the first to go, as being onsite with clients was less cost effective than doing web design and development from my home. Once that work was gone, I concentrated on getting more web development clients. By this stage (around 2000) things were getting tougher to find new clients. Every man and his dog was a “web designer” by that stage, so the quaint marketing methods that I initially used were not as effective. Leaflet drops did nothing, and cold calling did yield some results (and develop some great sales skills) but was very time intensive.

These days cold calling is an even harder game. You are trying to cut through the noise and deliver the signal that your offering is worthy and better than the last 10 jokers that called them and promised the earth.

The jobs that I was getting were from word of mouth referrals, direct enquiries from my website ( I had some great SEO rankings in those days for web design and development terms) and through some of the business associations. These were good, but not enough to make the level of income that I really needed to set me up in life. The kind of web design and development work I was doing were one off contracts for full sites or site makeovers. I did not have a large number of regular clients on recurrent billing like I do now.

What we really needed in those days were social media and decent PPC marketing like AdWords. With those tools, and the availability of reliable outsourced workers my business would have thrived. Sadly, these first few forays finished around 2001 when I sold the web design part of my business, and went into the corporate world for the next 5 years.

But that is another story for another day….

So what are the takeaways from this rambling tale of early business fortune and misadventure?

1) You now have massively useful marketing tools at your disposal, with the opportunity to get in front of thousands of targeted, hot, ‘ready to buy’ prospects every day. Don’t forget how lucky you are to be starting out now.

2) It is easier than ever to utilise traditional sources of leads and sales (networks and referrals) due to social media and the power of blogging

3) Everything is a test. If you are in doubt about your business idea or model and being held back by inaction the best thing to do is start. Don’t die wondering, get out there and give it a go. The marketplace will soon tell you how good your idea is, and how viable the business model is. While a lot of business success is about planning and developing a deep and comprehensive strategy, the most important thing when just starting out is view everything as an experiment. It is important to test and measure everything, and if what you are offering is not finding an audience, then consider that market research and bring out version 2, or start completely from scratch.

Til next time,

Steve Mills

Former Web Designer & Tech Support

Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love

Just saw an interesting service on the web at snopcap.com

It’s an easy to set up store widget with an integrated player. It is a widget that can sit anywhere on your blog or website, all you need to do is sign up for an account and put a few lines of code up.
To see one in action go over the blog Onesongperweek.com and have a look. There is one featured on the main page of the site, and at the end of every single entry on the blog. It keeps the storefront in the site visitors face at all time, but also provides a service in that site visitors can listen to the whole back catalogue of the artist quickly and easily if you “hook” them and they like what they hear.

The service also integrates into myspace and other social networking platforms. But what do they get for providing the service. 39 cents per track for single tracks, 20 cents per track if people buy a whole album for you. BUT, the service is free for the first 1000 tracks, and then after that if you are running a small label the cost is $100 per year, but you can contact them to work out a deal on the per track fees etc. The other thing is that it is a shared platform for retail as well, people running blogs and sites that promote the sort of music you make can add your tracks to their store, giving you virtual distribution for little effort.

The only other problem for myself and those that I personally know is that the service is only available to artists and labels in the US. I could see myself using this for my own work, and that of the label that I am in the process of setting up. The way that the widget is set up is that you can even host songs from bands that you know, and cross promote each others work on your site.

The address is www.snocap.com , well worth checking out. In fact, I am going to write to them today and see how long till Australian residents can set up an account.