This week’s report is the same as last week’s: I was too busy with client work to really do much work on Snip. I did get some SEO problems straightened out, which I’ll talk about later. And I started another AdWords campaign.
This week’s report: swamped with client work and not working on Snip at all.
I didn’t put out a report last week. Sorry.
In the last three weeks I’ve worked on Snip almost not at all. As you might know, Snip’s revenue is only about $200/mo and so I support myself and my family by doing freelancing/consulting work. About three weeks ago I wrapped up a client project and, due to undercharging and undermarketing, the end of this particular project put me in kind of a tight spot. No work and no money. So my #1 priority for the last three weeks was getting more work.
As of yesterday I do have work, so the emergency period is over. I think now I will benefit from thinking of how to prevent this situation from arising again.
I don’t remember when I first became aware of the idea of an automated marketing system, but the earliest I recall hearing it described is a few months ago in the I Love Marketing podcast. At this point it seems obvious. The idea is that instead of “doing marketing,” you build marketingĀ assetsĀ that you can deploy and reuse over and over without much additional effort.
An example would be an email autoresponder sequence. You build the autoresponder sequence once, set up a funnel to pull people into it, and it continues to work for you in the background while you move onto other things. Dan Kennedy also talks about automated marketing in his books and GKIC materials.
(If you don’t know, BFL = Ben Franklin Labs, my consulting business.)
I think now is the time when I’m going to start to get serious about building an automated marketing system for BFL. I’m choosing to prioritize BFL over Snip because when my income dries up the world stops and I can’t work on Snip. One thing I’m super grateful for, by the way, is that Snip can pay its own bills and therefore is not a financial liability.
I don’t really know yet what I need to do to build an effective marketing system, but I tend to believe that not knowing what to do is not a good reason for not getting started. One thing I think I’ll try is a multi-step direct mail campaign that drives prospects to an opt-in page on the BFL site where prospects can download my (not-yet existent) “5 things you absolutely must know before hiring a programmer” white paper in exchange for their name and email address, which I’ll plug into my newsletter and/or an autoresponder sequence.
I guess that’s all I feel like talking about right now. I expect to have something interesting to report by next Friday, although it very well may be mostly BFL-related.
Oh, one more thing, actually. Snip’s search rankings had been going in the fucking toilet for a few weeks and I didn’t really understand why, and for some stupid reason I didn’t bother to try to figure it out. There was a certain date after which my impressions and clicks just went off a cliff. I figured out sometime in the last few days that it very well may be because either a) sniphq.com (my old domain, the one with all the link juice) was no longer redirecting to snipsalonsoftware.com and therefore not passing along its link juice, probably because I moved snipsalonsoftware from DreamHost to DNSimple or b) Google Webmaster Tools, inside my jason@sniphq.com Google account, for some reason no longer considered sniphq.com verified (which I guess I can understand). So I moved sniphq.com from DreamHost to DNSimple and got the 301 redirect working, then I added sniphq.com to my jason@snipsalonsoftware.com Google Webmaster Tools account and verified it. I expect in a few days to see sniphq.com populated with search data, and hopefully with its links showing up under snipsalonsoftware.com as well. Then I can stop not getting any search traffic. š
This week’s report is a little late. Today is actually April 1st.
The new website is finally up! It’s not very impressiveĀ looking but you can see it here. Now that I have a WordPress-based marketing site the path is paved for exploding my content as well as adding opt-in pages to which I can send visitors from AdWords campaigns and/or direct mail campaigns. I’m pretty excited for the possibilities.
I’ve been continuing to chip away at the product. Nothing terribly fascinating to report here.
I still have a few loose ends to tie up with the website. The website has been such a huge prerequisite to so many other of my plans for so long that I realized just now I’m not even sure what I want to do first once the website switch is 100% done.
That’s all for now. I’m having a hard time concentrating because I’m at a coffee shop and a couple whiny whiners at a table next to me are complaining about their boss.