What to do when things aren’t working
Hello,
When you’re writing, you’re faced with a lot of decisions. What to lead with, what word to choose, how to round it up at the end. We make most of these decisions as we write - do I go with this word or that? Or in the editing process.
This week, I wrote a post that could have worked so much better had I put the ending first. It’s a LinkedIn post about sales pages. I lead with the statement: “sales pages don’t sell”. It’s a good opener. Likely to open debate and discussion, which it did.
But hidden away at the bottom was an analogy that I threw in at the last minute about storing house keys in the river. This is what I should have led with and I only realised this about an hour after I posted it.
This happens. I should have recognised it but I posted in a rush. I’ll edit and repost at a later date now that I know this.
Have you got any social media posts that you can go back and make better? If so, repost them and see if it makes a difference.
This week I had a marketing epiphany. It’s inspired this week’s long read and I hope it helps you.
How you spend your time is crucial to how well your business will perform. The problem is that many of us spend our time on things that aren’t serving us well.
Think about it - you do your content yourself because you don’t have or want the cost of getting someone else to do it for you. Except, you’re not tracking how much this is costing you in time. Or whether that marketing effort is leading to people who want to buy your stuff.
Except your time is a cost to your business. Let’s say you charge £50 an hour and spend about a day a week on your marketing. That’s 400 quid a week marketing budget plus any tech that you pay for like Canva or your email software.
The reason I think it’s important to look at it in this way is that if you didn’t have to do that, you’d have a whole extra day to work on clients or a whole extra day to do some business development or plan out that next big launch.
Even if you’re diy-ing your marketing, you still need to see the costs so that you can make sure what you’re doing is working for you.
I was challenged this week about how I’m spending my time. It’s a useful exercise to go through how your clients find you because often it’s not what you think it should be. That challenge this week has made me see a huge glaring error in my approach.
And the most irritating part of it is that the advice I needed is the EXACT advice I tell my mentoring clients.
Just because it works for another business doesn’t mean it is right for yours.
Before I get into this a bit more, I want to look at the two reasons why we might find it difficult to see the things that aren’t serving us. And this is as true for marketing as it is for other things in our lives.
We’ll feel like a failure
We enjoy it.
Let’s dig into the failure feelings first.
Seven years ago I launched a craft subscription box. At the time, there were very few subscription boxes in the UK and, as far as I could see, no craft subscription boxes. I saw a need, I worked my butt off and with £300 starting cash (definitely not enough) I launched my box.
I made some really big mistakes. Firstly, I launched the product too soon. I didn’t have enough warm people on my mailing list. I didn’t have enough capital to buy at wholesale so ended up losing money on the first few boxes. And I definitely didn’t have enough time. I had a newborn baby, a pre-schooler and not a lot of help.
I ran that business for two years. It made a decent profit in the end. I’d grown my Instagram to almost 10k and three weeks before I closed the business down, I was asked to run the business in conjunction with a national magazine.
On the face of it, I’d really started to scale the business. But in my heart, I knew it was time to shut the doors. This business wasn’t giving me what I wanted.
At the time, I found it really difficult to let go. I felt like my business had failed. I felt like I had failed. In fact, the opposite was true. I’d learned so much from those two years that when I pumped that into the other work I was doing - the work that became Indie Essentials - I found it so much more enjoyable and easy.
I kept that craft business running for probably longer than I wanted to but the moment I sold off the stock I felt an utter wave of relief. It took me a good few years to see the successes of that business and how I needed to do it so I could create my current business.
Feeling like you’re going to be a failure can suck up way more of your time than you realise.
If something isn’t working or giving you a niggling feeling in your stomach, try imagining your life where you don’t have to do it. If that feels like a weight off you then stop doing it. You don’t have to do it.
More importantly, trying something and it not working is never a failure. There is always a little golden seed that you can take from it and let it bloom elsewhere.
What if you enjoy it?
If you’re spending time on something that’s not serving you but you actively enjoy it then it’s much more of a complicated answer. Let’s say you enjoy writing and so you’re spending a big chunk of your time writing blogs.
Except no one is reading these blogs but they are watching the videos you put out on YouTube. No one can tell you to stop doing the thing you enjoy but it might be time to look at how you prioritise that time.
It might not be a blog, but might be spending time on Instagram. You have a lovely following but no one is coming from there to get your freebies or buy your products. Instead, these folks are coming in from elsewhere.
You may love Instagram and happily spend time on there but make sure your focus is on what’s working for your business as well.
I realised this week that something in my marketing strategy wasn’t working and even though I enjoy it thoroughly, it’s no longer what I need to do. You see, I’ve got something exciting launching later this year. I’ve been building for it for some time and I’ve been looking at how people who do similar market their business.
Big mistake.
What’s more irritating is I tell this to clients all the time: just because it works for their business, doesn’t mean it will work for yours.
And I see enough metrics to know that this is true. Yet, when I look at my own monthly metrics, instead of seeing “this isn’t working” I would see “this needs to work harder”.
What’s more, when I decided this week to simply stop - I felt a huge wave of relief. I came up with a better, stronger strategy that does work well with the time I have.
It’s easy to think that if only you had more time, more money, more of everything, then you could achieve your dreams without working quite so hard. The truth is that there will not be any more time and you have to work with what you’ve got.
Sometimes that means not doing that thing you enjoy. Sometimes that means doing it and giving it more of a chance to work. But it definitely means being able to track how what you’re doing is paying off.
Something not working for you?
If you know you enjoy creating content and that you feel it should be working better for your business, book a content clinic with me and I’ll go through how you can make it better. It might be a review of your Instagram, looking at your blogs, or reviewing your lead magnets.
Enjoy the sun this weekend and I’ll see you next Thursday.
Fiona