3by9

Marketing is like brushing your teeth

Last week Tyme imparted some knowledge upon all of you with regards to launches. In her entry she had a great quote by Eggman…errr…I mean Seth Godin.

The best time to promote something is after it has raving fans, after you’ve discovered that it works, after it has a groundswell of support. And more important, the best way to promote something is consistently and persistently and for a long time. Save the bunting for Flag Day.

He is correct in stating that the best time to promote your site is when you have people who are willing to back you up, but of course that is almost a Catch-22. You can’t get people without promoting, but you shouldn’t promote too hard until you have people backing you. If you wish to get anywhere though you have to promote consistently and this is a lesson I am learning all over again with Chawlk and our new 9 sites.

With 9rules we were blessed to have our leaf up on member sites and members talking about us on their blogs. It’s hard to get any better promotion than that, but with Chawlk you can’t run across a site on the web that is associated with it. That means we have to hit the streets and get out there and do some promoting of our own, while trying to convince people that our site is not only worth visiting, but registering with and coming back to as well.

There is a reason Don King makes so much money and it is because promoting is hard work. Actually, promoting is easy, but achieving successful results from your promoting is hard. Another problem with promoting is that you just might see it as being that much fun or interesting. I promoted for a club for a total of three weeks. It was easy telling people to go check the club out and if you smiled enough they would do it. The pay was good. Got to meet a lot of cool people. However, it sucked. The fun was working inside the club.

With your site or business though there is no distinction between was is fun and not fun. If it’s part of making your site successful then it needs to be done and it needs to be done consistently. There aren’t days off where you say you can go do some marketing tomorrow when you could be doing it today. You might not reach the same people tomorrow as you do today and if your competition is reaching them first guess who wins?

Even if all you can do is a small bit of promoting don’t hesitate to do it. If might simply involve leaving a comment on another site that doesn’t even bring over one person for the lifetime of its existence, but are you willing to take the chance it doesn’t? With so many competing products and sites, I can tell you a million varied ways to differentiate yourself from the crowd, but if the crowd doesn’t know you even exist then there is no point.

So go out there and do a bit of marketing today…after you brush your teeth.