I think I may have stumbled upon the secret of success in marketing, especially internet marketing.
Drumroll please: Rat tat tat tat tat tat tat.
And the secret of success is to do a whole lot of the marketing activity you have selected.
I’ve tested this secret on my preferred marketing technique for building my freelance writing and research practice, which is targeted phoning (unfortunately called cold calling by many). Everyone knows it’s a numbers game.
Many who are out there trying to market, or more accurately, who are thinking about marketing, put down phoning because it takes so much effort.
How I arrived at this revelation
For several years I was consumed with reading marketing articles and listening to free teleseminars and following the gurus of marketing and motivational literature. Suddenly it bored me. I already knew everything they were saying. Nothing new. Plus it was stirring me up to go in too many directions.
Five simple tips to build your list. Eight ways to get all the clients you want. Do these six steps or you’ll forever fail. Blah, blah, blah.
I was making progress on most of them while allowing a few to fall by the wayside.
I read and read and read. And as for the teleseminars, I listened and listened and listened every time I was in the car alone.
Two useful pieces of info revealed themselves along the way. Ezinearticles had a short audio (sorry, I don’t have links to the specific resources) about writing perhaps 100 articles on a single keyword campaign, each article sufficiently different to be posted to their single website.
And Sean D’Souza wrote an article about how he commented on blogs at a furious pace for years to build his internet presence.
It takes a lot of effort to test my hypothesis for several marketing strategies at the same time, but in terms of phoning for assignments, I know it’s true. It takes more work than we would wish, but the law of large numbers works, assuming we strategically select people to call and carry out our campaigns with a reasonable amount of professionalism.
I suspect that it takes a lot of activity to make almost any marketing technique work. If people understood this about all techniques, not just phoning, the choice would be made on a more level playing field.
Originally posted 7-19-12