Normally, the phrase is alpha and omega, but as we approach the end of a year, I prefer to reflect on the end and then the beginning.
This has been a momentous year, for the nation, world and for me. For me it has been a transitional year, from one where my focus was on my collectibles business, and the journey I have taken to migrate out of into a new internet venture.
The beginning of the year was taken up with the Marty Estate, by far the nicest accumulation of philatelic material I have had the privilege of handling in my almost 30 years as a part to full time dealer. Toward mid year, I focused on the home staging industry. I designed and conducted a significant survey of home staging professionals from around the US and Canada.
It was, if I may say so myself, a well done survey that focused on the individual needs of home stagers as small business people. I created a significant report that clearly set out the circumstances and obstacles faced by home stagers. My hope was that I would be able to follow up and create some products to assist them as a group. I did conduct one teleseminar on the need for opt in forms on their web pages, which was well received by the handful of people who caught it. I was less successful in selling my report on the survey results.
During the year, I discovered Bob the Teacher. I took about a half dozen of his online courses, and credit him with my breaking through on many of the critical skills essential to internet marketing. The break through course for me was his teleseminar course, but not so much for the teleseminar part, but rather a piece of it that gave me a glimpse of how to use my Cpanel. I eventually took his Cpanel course which did a lot to demystify much of the barriers that had gotten in my way previously.
By accident, I chanced into a relationship with Doug Champigny which has turned into a godsend. Doug is leading a group of marketers who are helping each other out, for free. Now we do promote Doug’s products as well as those of others in the group, which is certainly not a difficult thing to do, as they are generally low price and high quality.
As the year progressed, I have learned more about blogging, article writing, traffic exchanges, and more importantly realized that my home stagers were not alone in their individual plight. I shared it, and so to do thousands of other small business people.
We may as very small business owners know one or two things quite well, and many others pretty well, but for the most part we all have arenas where we don’t know diddly squat. What’s often a problem is that that’s where we either spend too much time, or not enough time.
If we spend too much time trying to figure things out ourselves, we are taking time away from what we are good at. If we spend too little time, it’s because we have decided to live without. Neither is optimum.
For my home stagers, it was clear that for many of them, the area they left out was marketing. Almost none of them had any form of lead capture. I suspect this is true of many people in other businesses as well. This fact was so obvious to me, I focused my first teleseminar on it. And so it seems, this earlier work I did with home stagers will become my focus for the future.
The vast majority of offline businesses do their web pages wrong. They have web pages created by their children or even by first rate web designers, but as good as many are creatively, they fall flat on a critical understanding of what the potential value of a web page is for a business.
And that is my plan for the coming year. I have decided to all but abandon my philatelic pursuits. Instead I will focus on assisting small businesses move from their static web sites into a more aggressive format that will reduce their existing advertising costs while building their customer base.
This blog, MicroBusinessSpecialist will become my flag ship for the coming adventure. I know I can help hundreds of businesses do better. I can do it cost effectively for them, and yet make a good fee for myself. This is my Alpha for the coming year.
I will succeed, because I have to. But additionally, I have a solid set of knowledge I can offer that will make a difference for my prospective customers. I learned a long time ago, that you make money by helping other people make money. I guess I was too into my hobby to not recognize that I wasn’t actually doing that there.
My plan is to focus on offline businesses, in my own area, although much of what I have to say and do can be done for businesses wherever they are located. So I will maintain an active web presence.
And while I will focus on this key function of helping businesses develop more aggressive web sites, I will continue to develop my own skills as an information marketer. Through this process, I will learn to keep up to date on new techniques. Afterall, the “how to make money on the internet” arena is probably the second most competitive arena on the internet after porn. This is where the cutting edge tools are most aggressively taught and experimented. By building my skills here, I will be all the better equiped to assist those for whom learning internet “how to” is boring, or confounding.
This is my Omega and Alpha. A transitional year is ended. A building year is ahead. If I can be of any assistance to you. Let me know. It’s going to be a blockbuster of a year.