I just finished reading the book by Sam Walton, the guy who made Walmart. What I learnt from him and any of the most successful entrepreneurs is that they have a unique ability to test an idea, either by swagger-jacking or being original, experiment to see if it works and discard it if it does not. This iterative process is a key mentality to making things work. The speed at which the most successful people work through this process is quite astonishing. So, what is something I am lacking and that I need to fix in less than 30 days. I work for a company where the future does not look very bright. I have 30 days to find a second source of income and I DO NOT HAVE ANY OPTION. As the vikings would call it "burning the boats". What it means, when they went for war, they would burn their boats so that they could not come back. This way they had to somehow find a way to conquer the island they set out to win. This is a key mentality that makes people successful. To imagine your self having a gun to your head. How ruthlessly efficient would you be?
So this is my plan for the next 25 odd days. I need to make sales with Antsand.com/services. Antsand service is nothing but a service to help you get your blog started. Is this idea new? Hell f**k no. Then why work on something that is not new? There is huge market for creating blogs and not every idea needs to be new. As long as there is a market we just need to take part of the market share to make it work. Sam Walton did not start retail because it was new, but the method in which he conducted his retail business was simple and quite novel - keep it cheap and satisfaction guaranteed. The new idea can be in the form of price margin, services offered or even the process in which it is conducted. This is what makes our service different. It cheap with great customer support and satisfaction guaranteed.
How am i going to do it?
For the 1st 10 to 15 clients we will do the job at an insanely cheap price. This is to get testimonials. We will do it with family, close friends, for our clubs just to keep the ball rolling. When we have active customers we will get promising feedback and data to play with. This to me is essential. We need live customer data to make critical decisions.
2. I need to create a marketing plan in the form of email, direct mail, facebook campaign, adwords, etc to bombard our key target audience that we are the solution to what you want and need. If they do not see us everywhere they wont trust us. We as human work with things we are familiar with. Advertising to our key customers everywhere is essential to build trust and to grab their attention. Social media marketing by itself is huge and complex. I would need to study abit on this and be ruthlessly effective in my time and energy and output.
3. Video explanatory. We need to create a video explaining how our customer can benefit and use our service, This I will complete as soon as I finish typing this blog. Without a video explaining how we serve our customers, the idea may not be that clear.
There is alot more to making sales, -playing with the prices, playing with the copywrite message, playing with the web template the video our customers testimony etc. All of this needs to be experimented, tested and see what works and what does not. Can I do this in 25 days? Can I start to earn a good 3000$/mo at the end of 25 days? Is it easy, hell no. Is it possible? With the right thinking, right action and execution it very well is. I do not have much time to waste as my boat is literally burning and I do not have a plan of escape. I am going to be writing this blog as a 25 day challenge, and everyday I will have to get 1 customer on board.
Now the math. Does it all add up?
Before I get hung up on what I need to do, lets get into some math. this will help with pricing, and what we need to charge our customers.
To earn 3000$/mo, for our base price of 9.99USD I would need to get 12 customers a day for the next 25 days. Is it possible. This is out of my reach.
If I get 1 customer a day, I get 25 at the end of my challenge and that would give me 250$/mo . Clearly our prices are way too cheap to earn something decent. May be this is what we need to do. For the 1st 15-20 customers we will charge 9.99$. After the 25th customer we will up our price to 15$/mo. As of now, I will even set up blogs for free with our friends in return for some awesome testimonial.
Back to the drawing board to make my video. Let the challenge begin; I want my readers to keep me accountable, help me out and see how we can make our business succeed. If you have ideas please leave us a comment below.