TDC Day 30: Day 30 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Today you are going to learn about mistakes that marketers make.
2. According to Ed: “Marketers make a lot of mistakes all the time. The best thing is to learn from the mistakes. You are going to learn from what other people have done incorrectly, so you don’t have to repeat them yourself.”

TDC Day 30a: Mistakes Marketers Make (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. The biggest part of a problem is knowing you have one.
2. Remember back to Day 2 and Ed’s Magnificent symphony of 4 parts: market research, traffic, conversion, and product. Well, mistakes often happen in the same order.
3. MARKET RESEARCH: “Ninety five percent of the mistakes are in market research.”
4. Market Samurai makes market research easy which is good because it is the most important part.
5. Use 30DC for testing for a market that “pops” - but you are also establishing a business foundation and can make money during your market research.
6. One common mistake during market research is struggling to find an idea - often this comes down to people being stuck in a narrow comfort zone and they filter out all the other opportunities. It may be worth picking something completely out of your comfort zone in something you know you won’t go through with it just to open your eyes up to a different set of results. There are 100,000s of markets and phrases that are profitable and that people are currently profiting from.
7. TRAFFIC: 3 sources of issues
8. People get too attached to poorly performing phrases and can’t let go - Allison Reynolds (TDC Moderator) calls this Stockholm Syndrome (falling in love with your kidnapper). This a problem, even Google’s data isn’t always 100% accurate, you must always test the reality and be prepared to let go if it doesn’t stack up.
9. Your phrase may be affected by the seasons or trends, investigate the factors. For example, Christmas decorations are only going to be popular at the end of the year (but then they are really popular). Know your market’s fluctuations and assess whether you want something with more constant traffic. If there is not enough traffic and it can’t be explained, move on.
10. (Note that if you have a small business or you’re a musician, you may not have traffic for certain keywords for a number of days - you then have to focus more on making sure that you capture your traffic as prospects when you do get them. You want to cover all phrases no matter how small the traffic.)
11. Time is the third mistake in traffic. Often people do not give enough time to test traffic as it could be a “lumpy” business - you may have a lot of traffic one day and then very little the next. If you only waited one day then you would not see the full picture.
12. CONVERSION: “The biggest mistake that people make at this stage is to tinker too early.”
13. You need at least 200 visitors to test something at a bare minimum. Ideally, you’d have 1000. This means giving it time and not changing stuff after a day if you’ve made no sales (but you’ve only had 100 visitors).
14. The second biggest mistake in conversion is when people try to be someone else. Ed recommends just to be yourself and tell a story as “the number one thing that can help with your conversion”. If you want to know what makes a good story, Ed recommends Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath.
15. PRODUCT: “The biggest mistake people make with the product stage is, of course, making the product first.”
16. You will notice that we haven’t talked about product. Without market research, traffic and conversion a product is nothing. Most people start with a product first, this is a mistake - you should do market research first.
17. Get familiar with a market, see what people want - let them tell you want product they want. Look at their questions and see how you can best answer their questions with the most appropriate type of product.
18. If you already have your own product or service then you should be doing market research to find all the phrases that people use when they look in search engines to find your service. Remember Google Local. This is a great opportunity for location based businesses to be optimised for location based searches (eg “plumber in Atlanta”).
19. Also remember A FAILED TEST IS NOT A CHARACTER ASSESSMENT: failed tests aren’t failures they are just part of testing. Don’t make them more than what they really are.

TDC Day 30: Wordpress Direct Update (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. If you use Wordpress Direct, it is worth looking at the update changes in the PDF.

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.