Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Inbound and outbound marketing are two types of marketing that you can use to bring users to you.  Inbound is where your tactics and methods bring the users to you whereas outbound revolves more around buying ads, buying spots on email lists, buying sales leads and then reaching out to those people.  Both are effective at reaching your target audience and we’ll discuss briefly both.

Inbound marketing is here to stay and often comes across as more genuine.  One method for inbound marketing is content marketing.  This doesn’t mean needing to buy an ad, but would require time spent on behalf of the marketing person writing content say for a blog or paying someone to write the content.  This written content would be things like seo, email newsletters, blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies.  This customer progression would look something like: Read some articles/blog posts -> Sign up as a subscriber -> Purchase product.  

Outbound marketing is more of a traditional approach to marketing.  Typical examples of this would be buying ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Another option would be using affiliate marketing where someone works to sell your product for you and they take a cut of each sale sent to you.  The goal with either channel of marketing, but especially outbound marketing is to make sure that the cost of acquiring the customer is less than the lifetime value of the customer else it doesn’t make sense to continue that paid service.  If you spend $1 to get a customer you want to earn more than that $1 over the life of working with that customer.

Biggest bet ever!

Hello World.

I made the biggest bet I’ve ever done with my brother this week.  Its on like donkey kong.  The bet is that I will work on business for 5 hours per week and if I don’t have it done by Saturday at midnight then I owe that sucka…..$500.  Yup.  In one week if I don’t follow through this chump will get my hard earned dough.  This post is to do an update.  The other day I was looking into doing this bet on stick.com that my other brother showed me, which I really liked because on it they have a space where the individual can do a journal update.  Hence why I’m doing this post.  I’ll just do my journaling here.

$500 is going well.  I'm at 2 hours and 59 minutes and 56 seconds out of 5 hours.  I haven't made any money yet, but I think I've saved myself some time.  I can't quite discern how great asking w/o selling will be for me, but so far it is working out great.  Example.  I was thinking maybe instead of buying an eBay business I'd just contact realtors and ask them to ask their clients to list stuff to sell with me.  Turns out realtors can't accept commissions/kickbacks for stuff like that.  Plus I was thinking that isn't a home based business and would be a drag to have to go to someone's house and take pictures and then list and then coordinate shipping and and and...too much!  So I nixed that idea. 

Two days ago I read through the Utah state fair guidebook to see what is up with being a vendor there.  Then I looked up costs for buying stuff to do that.

I'm also onto to seeing if making eBooks could be a thing I could do or not.  I figured I could list my barter skills/items that I posted to udemy.com as an eBook to get the feel for it.  Turns out I deleted the text of it once I posted the video and I can't find it anywhere.  Only way I think I could get it, w/o having to transcribe the videos that is, is to ask my friend Tyler Warnick if he perhaps has that one copy I sent him that one time.  That'd be a bit of work and would have to search his emails for attachments I've sent him and then resend it back to me.  If not no worries.  I think the eBook thing though could be a good idea.  Ashlee bought some children’s temple book for like $9 and I’m just thinking that is dumb cause it is a big book and it'd be much better to have that and a billion other books on a tablet or something to save on weight and preserve colors and what not.  So I think I'll try and make that happen.  It'd be something I could do from home and ideally something I could outsource and automate 4-hour workweek style.

Another idea I think I may try and loop back around to as well would be selling people/companies on making apps for them like restaurants and small businesses.  So we'll see.  I figure I'll just keep going on this process of working on business 5 hours per week and eventually I'll land somewhere that makes sense. 

I've been listening to this podcast.  http://automatemysmallbusiness.com/   It's been interesting to listen to the different things they've got going and how they're doing it.  Listening to them makes me think I need to keep going with pursuing business ideas that I can automate for sure.  Its just the way to go and is way cheaper/efficient.  I definitely envy how they're able to work the 4-hour workweek life.  

One thing I really like about their podcast is the ease with which they're able to start new businesses because they have experience in automating their own existing businesses.  I also really like product based businesses.  I think I really want to transition eventually to digital products and ideally subscription based digital products.

One thing they recommend doing is hiring a VA (virtual assistant) to do some task for you.  It doesn't even have to be for business.  It can be for anything.  One thing I'm thinking I'd have a VA do for me is research the most reliable and cheapest solar panel unit to power small things like a laptop, ipod, phone, etc.  Tyler wrote me telling me where he's living that they had an ice storm that knocked out power for a whole day and it was cold.  Fortunate for them they had food and were able to stay at the in-laws who had a wood burning stove and so they were a toasty 75 degrees.  They didn't have anything as far as batteries and flashlights though.  So I think that may be something I work on business wise this week is hire a VA to do that for me so I get experience hiring someone and interviewing them and I can do it for cheap.  Exciting!

I figure I've just got to continue to surround myself with business ideas/success and then take out the option of not doing something and work on business each week.  On my way home from work I’m listening to the biography of Warren Buffet that my dad highly recommended.  Guy just kept trying to figure it out and was a little schemer since he was a kid.  He even wrote off his bike and helmet I think for his paper route to lower his taxable income on his newspaper delivery business ha ha....sigh.  That’ll be me.  I actually liked one thing a lot from the super bowl, specifically Russell Wilson.  His dad would tell him when he was growing up, "Russell, why not you?"  For whatever reason that really resonated with me.  Why not me?  I deserve it just like anybody else.

My Friend’s Dollar Denial

I have a friend who has been reading a bunch on the unfortunate demise of the US dollar.  He’s also watched some good material about it.  He’s even gone so far as to diversify out of dollars into hard assets.  This morning however he is totally bummed about the dollar price of said assets.  I encouragingly tried to get him to look at the investments in non-dollar terms and he wasn’t having any of it. 

It is hard sometimes for me to even comprehend that the dollar will lose its status and purchasing power completely one day, but I feel they will.  I told my friend yesterday that I am crazy in that I essentially don’t mind (I actually love when they get hammered down in price/dollar terms) when hard assets become worth less in dollar terms cause that just means I can buy more of it before this whole thing goes.  If any of you have ever played the game cash flow and come across the stock card that has MYT4U for sale at $1/share, that is what I feel hard assets are like right now.  They’re the thing you invest 100% of your money into and you just wait out the game until the stock revalues to the appropriate price.  Exciting. 

I am also grateful for the new debt deal the democrats/republicans struck cause it is just going to speed up the collapse that much faster.  Exciting.