TheStraddlersDiary

POST: Is it possible to be entrepreneural within an existing company?

Mark Donnigan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:27:07 -0800

I have recently come in contact with a company which happens to be the leader in our industry. This company is currently launching a new range of products which according to them are going to create sales opportunities in the mass channel which currently do not exist. Furthermore, they are willing (or so they say) for this product to be spun out of or incubated to be spun off from the parent company.

All this sounds really interesting to me. It is appealing to have the resources ($$$) of a large and healthy organization, while enjoying the autonomy and ability to build a culture and organization that is separate and distinct from the mother ship.

But I can't help but ponder, is it really possible to build something that can be truly entrepreneurial and have it flourish inside a larger organization? For example, how will people feel when they find themselves grinding away the same old way they have for years, only to have this new group emerge beside them who appear to be free to reinvent every aspect of their job and business practice? Or what happens if the staff working at the parent company all decide they want to imbue their jobs with some more excitement and the way to do that is try something new- i.e. join this new enterprise?

My sense is that these are great "problems" to wrestle with. Also, what I didn't tell you is that this company is run by people who don't believe that status quo and taking the safe path is how you build a great company. So it should be no surprise that less than 5 years ago they sold-out to a larger conglomerate for a tidy sum. Meanwhile retaining all control and more than doubling the size of their enterprise.

I think I'm going to "go for it". This is an opportunity to have investors, but investors who really care about your success, not just a GMROI. Oh, they care about profit to be sure. But they also care about individual success and personal fulfillment. Sound to good to be true? Well as I've written many times, stay tuned for more details...

RAVE: Sam Zell to reinvent the Tribune?

Mark Donnigan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:11:29 -0800

The turnaround of the Tribune will be an interesting business reinvention story, I predict! Sam Zell the well known billionaire purchased the Tribune Company last year and has recently assumed the CEO post. In the video below, you will see that business is not that difficult if you simply strip away everything that doesn't add value, hire great people, let them do their jobs and then trust them.
Sam Zell's Talk at the Chicago Tribune

POST: What is your vision?

Mark Donnigan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:55:39 -0800

I have been watching a phenomenal video series on business and spiritual vision called "The Vision of the Leader" by Bruce Wilkinson. The production quality is first rate, and Bruce is an engaging speaker, but these facts alone are not why I write about this video series.

In "The Vision of the Leader", Bruce raises the question, what if God deposits something so deep in you that your efforts combined with God's vision and burden are multiplied exponentially beyond what is humanly possible?

It's in this framing that Bruce takes the audience through the journey of how God births, nurtures, releases and launches a vision. Whether you have a burden to do something secular or sacred, the information presented applies.

It's with this thought that I am personally struck. Is there a difference between sacred and secular?

I believe that God doesn't see a difference. As several high profile, very successful businessmen are interviewed in this video series, the stories are remarkable of how God birthed dreams to bring honor and glory to the Lord through doing business in a fully Christlike manner. So whether your burden is to do something 100% sacred, or 100% secular, if your heart is in line with the Lord's I believe you will change the world.

So what is your vision?

On-line marketing FAQ: Building your lists

Mark Donnigan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:33:48 -0800

One of the most frequently asked questions for online marketers, is how to build a list? Since the key to on-line riches is to create your very own media outlet which you can promote to over and over that consists of highly targeted people who will buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous offerings. Building a list becomes one of the single most important things you must do for your on-line business to prosper.

Once your list stretches over the five thousand mark, you should have at least one product for sale, with the majority of contacts on your list coming from the promotion of that initial product. Avoid any program or plan that asks you for cash to add subscribers to your list because without a track record of success, compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer.

There is no comparison to a “home grown” list in terms of quality. Which means it is important to recognize that the ways in which you will build your list do not involve direct methods or magic programs that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning, and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to.

Instead concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your site(s), make sure they end up on one of your lists.

If we look at building your list(s) this way, all it takes is for them to buy something, signup for something, request a follow-up, join your affiliate program, and so on...to become added to your list.

A very important point is to never create anything that allows customers to complete the sales process, only to lose contact with them. This is exactly why you need to ensure that everything related your site, involves collecting names and email addresses. It should become “standard operating procedure”. But be careful, over do it and your prospects are going to leave your site before you have a chance to know who they are.

Now let’s look at some numbers starting off with simple joint ventures.

Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. With standard e-zines this may not seem like much because the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit, can and will typically be lower than expected.

But through joint ventures, subscription rates can top one in three, and it's not unusual for at least 25% (one in four) of your visitors to subscribe to something, if your sales copy is doing its job.

That may not seem like a high percentage right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5,000 subscribers, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem (if the quality of your joint ventures is high), you will begin earning significantly through the sales of your joint ventures. This is the ultimate in leveraging someone else's hard work. But the truth is they are leveraging your hard work in producing your product. So in reality we have here a classic "win-win".

But this gets most interesting when you couple in affiliate commissions which you will pay out at a very high rate, so high that you may not make a direct profit, but thats not the point at this stage. The resources that you are building is your profit, not the money from product sales, but the resources (subscriber list) that is being expanded.

This is why you gave up $50 per sale perhaps, and it's your affiliates and joint ventures that money is going to. At this stage, it should not be concerning to you that upwards of 90% (or more) of your total sales revenue is going to building your list. Your sole focus needs to be set on your list size and not just numbers wise, but speed wise. Time is what you are racing here as it's important to get a quality list of suitable size built as quickly as possible so you can begin marketing to it and profiting from it.

Every single time you release a new product, you will be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you. It's the classic snowball effect, which is great because this means the more you put in, the more you're going to get out. And every single product you release will increase your resources and your list size, adding to your promotion power for future products.

I want to make 100% sure that you understand how this works.

People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists. This is great and it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, I'm afraid they are incomplete.

It's ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, but so should building affiliates, new long term customers and joint venture prospects.

To be successful, you must integrate list building into all your marketing methods, which is what most fail to do. Once you understand and have mastered how these resources work together, you will start to see bigger and better results, and they will come quickly.

It is my hope that you now see how building a list isn't a case of buying as big a list as you can afford. Those promoting this method are simply in the list sales business. But rather the success of list building is tying resources together through the launch of your own products till you are able to earn the big rewards that come when you have a highly qualified list of people who trust you and are willing to buy most everything you put in front of them.

This is the straddling entrepreneur’s dream. To earn money while you are working, playing and sleeping. A virtual cash machine in your very own home. But wait, if it were that easy you'd already be a millionaire right? So stay tuned for more On-line marketing FAQ's were I am going to debunk myths and hopefully get you started down the path of becoming an on-line marketing entrepreneur.

On-line Marketing FAQ - How do I get hits to my site?

Mark Donnigan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:52:27 -0800

"How do I get hits?" must be the number one question asked by online marketers. After all, without getting visits to your site you can't sell anything. The problem is not only do most people go about this the wrong way, but when this question is approached they are given incorrect answers which will consist of buying some sort of service or ad that will solve all of your traffic problems.

Although this may seem like the way to go at first glance it's actually counter productive to your efforts. One thing I want to point out is that your initial aim isn't to get hits to your site at all. Understand that you only need to pull ten or twenty thousand hits in total, ever, to your sites to make them successful.

Of course this number will increase as you progress through your resource building, and that's key here. The resources that are built and that you can use over and over again are the following:

Affiliates
Lists
Customers
Long term customers
Joint venture partners

The problem comes when someone tells you to go out and buy ads from search engines, e-zines, street vendors, the kid next door (OK, I'm going a bit far here, but you get my point). If you don't have the resource collection methods established to collect the big 5, you will find yourself starting over again with every promotion each time you launch a product.

This is the exact reason that no matter how many hits some marketers get to their sites, they will never earn more than a couple of thousand dollars a month profit, if that even.

The second problem comes when people assume, or are indeed told, that you need to get hundreds of thousands of hits to be a success. This is definitely not true either. Although again I see how it may seem like that is true on the surface. That's why I always teach intro products and follow-up products, because lets face it, how many $1200 products do you need to sell in a month to equal your current personal income from your job, or to reach your goals of having more free time, money in the bank etc.

Also, lets not lose sight of why we started in online marketing in the first place. It definitely wasn't to spend massive amounts of cash trying to get your website stats to read high numbers. Numbers don't mean quality, no matter what anyone tells you, this is fact.

Compare a single 10k list of joint venturing to 100k subscribers of an e-zine ad.

I assure you, you'll get more click throughs from the e-zine ad, but put the numbers together and you'll get a far higher percentage of sales through the single quality joint venture.

So how do you get more hits to your site? Well first off the question is void because more rarely means better results. Look for quality, and the answer is joint venturing, building these resources, and having others promote your products for really high commissions to attract the numbers.

If you're only getting a few thousand hits per month from joint ventures, that's not a problem. Forget guaranteed hits, forget e-zine ads for directly promoting your site and forget search engine positioning. They might bring you more in the way of numbers, but it's big sales we want, not big numbers. In that situation always think quality over quantity.

So ask me again when you’ve carried out a couple of joint ventures and have begun to build your affiliates, your customer base, your contacts and your list, how do you get hits to your site?

That’s why you’ve been building your resources. That’s where your visits and sales come from. The more products you launch, the more resources you gather, the easier this is. The most expensive time consuming part is getting started. After this, it’s cheap, quick and easy to recycle what you’ve gathered to produce a never ending flow of visits and sales.