The Plan for the Next Month

Today, my “one thing” is to basically plan out what I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks. Generally, what I’m doing is testing out different methods of marketing and figuring out what works.

But here are the specifics!

There are more tasks needed than to just test different marketing methods. I need to do some research first to prioritize what I’m going to be trying, I need to rethink my messaging, I need to rewrite a lot of copy for my site, I need to read a bit about putting together landing pages, and then I need to actually build landing pages.

So there’s a lot to be done, but luckily I’ve allocated 10 hours each week to accomplishing just these things. That should be plenty!

The tasks are all sorted below in terms of priority. There should really only be one priority at any given time, so my goal is to focus entirely on the first one, and then when it’s completed, move on to the second one.

Hopefully, after about a month, I’ll be fully testing many methods and starting to have some success with it.

So here they are!

1. Rethink and redevelop my positioning and messaging

My business has seen a great deal of change over the last few years, and I think it’s time that I put together some better positioning and messaging.

Historically, I’ve based everything on some idealistic notions of what we wanted to do, and never really had a strong sense of brand identity or direction when writing my copy. Much of what still exists on my site is really just something I threw out there to try and see what would stick.

Some things have stuck, others haven’t. I have enough experience, knowledge of what works, and insight into where I want to go that I think I can finally put something more concrete and effective together.

The first step in this process will be to write down exactly how I want to proceed with this. I need some action steps to get it accomplished, and then I can go through and actually do it. That will likely start today!

Note that I just bought a new book, “Obviously Awesome”, that tackles a lot of positioning stuff. It won’t come until Saturday, but I should definitely read that first and use it to guide me a bit.

2. Revise Website Content

Based on the results of #1, I will then have a clear sense of what needs to be done on the website.

I’ll need to generally go through the website and make some broad decisions about the changes I want to make. To start, I don’t expect that I’ll be changing a lot of designs or anything; I mostly just need to rewrite the text content.

I know that a lot of work went into the site SEO from both myself and a hired company, but realistically, I don’t think my home page pulls in much search traffic so I don’t think I have to worry about large changes all that much.

The key will be to focus is on my new messaging and make everything clear to our target market. While I don’t want to just throw all the past work into the trash, I think it’s more important to worry about getting our messaging right than it is to worry about SEO at this point.

So for this process, just like for #1, I’ll want to start with a plan of attack and systematically go through it all and figure out next steps.

#3. Develop a Landing Page

I’m going to need at least one, good landing page to try and drum up sales. I’ll likely need more later, but I think I should put together one really solid one before engaging too much in the other tests.

I just purchased a couple books on Amazon regarding landing pages and conversion more generally. I’m hoping to power through those quickly to prepare for this step.

With more knowledge, I should be able to make them fairly effective.

#4. Determine the Most Cost-Effective Places to Advertise and Try

I think it might pay to do a little research before I dive head-first into trying new marketing methods.

I had just assumed that I would test out Adwords, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn.

But what if there are way more worthwhile places? Some ones that might be worth looking into are:

• Bing and Yahoo
• Yelp, Manta, Google Maps, Apple Maps
• Website hosting review sites
• Other niche websites of that nature
• Sponsoring a YouTube channel or something along those lines
• Small local organizations

And of course, I should also just simply do some searches for the best places/ways to advertise for my type of business.

Specifically, I should be researching all of these places and finding out which ones are likely to work the best for a business like mine.

Some of this research can then be used in later steps when I do the actual testing.

Side-note: it seems like all of the really-effective Facebook ads I’ve seen, and all of the ones that seem to spend a lot of money there are the ones that solve a very large pain point for their clients, such as “how to get new clients”, or “how to scale a business”, or other things like that.

I’m not totally convinced that it’s an effective place to solve a pain point of “my website is slow”, because the pain isn’t that large, the reward for solving it not great (or so they think), and the perceived effort and/or cost of fixing it is high. This thought could maybe be an entire blog post!

#5. Run the Tests

At this point, it’s time for me to actually go through and start testing everything.

Once again, I’ll want to make a specific plan of attack here, but I think I’ll probably want to do something like this:

1. Prioritize the places I’ll be testing
2. Research each one specifically to put together the ads that are most likely to be effective
3. Put together the ad and run it
4. Move on to the next place while the ad is running
5. Return to evaluate the results, and potentially tweak the ad and retry

After a while, I should have gone through every one and tried them out. Hopefully I’ll have had some success and can double-down on the areas that are working.

#6. Regroup and Re-analyze Blogging

This one might sort of fall into #5 as well, but I think I should continue blogging, but need to really re-think and re-analyze how I’m doing it.

I’ll want to think through what the purpose of the blog is, who I want to bring there, and how I want to do it.

From there, I can put a plan in place to continue and improve it, and hopefully get some more paying customers from it.

 

Lastly, I want to put some general timelines on everything so I have some idea of when these things will get done and can track how I’m doing.

These are pretty preliminary, but should still be able to guide me.

Rethink and redevelop my positioning and messaging
1 Week

Revise Website Content
1 Week

Develop a Landing Page
0.5 Weeks

Determine the Most Cost-Effective Places to Advertise and Try
1 Week

Run the Tests
3-5 Weeks

Regroup and Re-analyze Blogging
0.5 Weeks

That’s it! I should be done with all of this within a couple months. And from there, hopefully I can just double-down and continue optimizing my most successful test.