Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself
Eleanor Roosevelt
Websites is firmly the #1 subject I get asked about when it comes to business. Why? Well, I’m perceived by others as a guy who knows about them.
Why? Well I guess because I run a successful E Commerce site (Two in fact) but the story goes a little deeper than that.
In 2004 (ish) I became a sales guy for a digital marketing agency. The deal was good, I could make a tonne of money in a short space of time, and to boot……I knew absolutely nothing about websites.
So began a journey which led me here today. The company I joined made this funky little platform called Web Beads, for the time it was pretty innovative, almost like a fore runner of Word Press which I am using right now for this blog.
In order to effectively sell anything, really you need some knowledge about the product. So I got a website for my then martial arts club and started working on it. I got this site so right that ten years after I closed it down, I still get calls about the service I offered. It makes me wonder now what I could have achieved with a website designed to make money not one for a part time martial arts club.
Over the next year or so, I learned about effective layouts, messaging, marketing, SEO and a whole bunch more. By the time I left that company I thought I was a Website Black belt…….I was wrong
In 2008 I started planning a new business based on using an E commerce store with a then new platform, Magento. Now, I had ZERO thought of this being my main business, it was meant to be a sideline.
By 2010 I had left the digital marketing agency and was running the first incarnation of my first brand “Fightstore”.
Another new platform, something that by blind luck probably gave me lift off with what became abbreviated to FSMMA (Fightstoremma) was Google Shopping.
Now at the time, Google shopping was brand new and believe it or not, completely FREE! By January 2010 I had literally made thousands of pounds trading my first Christmas run with my brand new E commerce store. I remember sitting in our tiny office above a gym I owned literally watching sales drop in on the computer screens.
We went from zero to £5k a month, to £10k a month to £20k a month all within a relatively short period.
In a three years we went from nothing to a serious contender in the market, we moved premises twice, took on staff and most importantly we made almost every mistake available to us to make.
Most Importantly, we made almost every mistake available to us to make!
Marketing became my profession, but not for someone else. For my own company. I must say, when you do this for yourself your perspective on those who offer you such services really changes, both in a positive and a negative way.
I had previously had a role in advertising within a popular Mixed Martial Arts Magazine, during that time I had learned much about the winners and the losers in that game. Advertising is the same no matter what format it takes.
Whilst we were doing well overall, we were not making the kind of money which would allow us to hand many tasks over to marketeers, not to mention I had direct experience of how inefficient and expensive they could be. However from time to time I would find an expert in a field which would take us up a level. I learned from both the successes and the failures, I learned from the good guys in marketing who were upfront about what we faced, the methodology and their role however I learned much more from the promises of those who built businesses on the ignorance of their customers, some of which were little more than corporate legitimised scams.
The toughest call can be deciding who to listen to and who to ignore.
I have seen SEO/PPC & Web Design companies charge thousands of pounds for a few hours work which could have been done by a GCSE student in their break times. When you start a business, unless you live in a bubble, you will suddenly find you are inundated with supply offers of every kind. One mistake is to listen to them all, another is not to listen to any of them. The toughest call can be deciding who to listen to and who to ignore.
The Fightstore E commerce business made me discover how to do a whole bunch of things for myself including SEO and Adwords management. I learned Photo editing skills, how to create banners, copy writing and would research every aspect of building a brand.
When I joined the team of upcoming American Fight Gear brand REVGEAR, my learning curve accelerated massively. The owner Paul, had a habit of hiring a variety of ‘experts’ some good, some bad, but this was Los Angeles consultant culture and I was not going to escape it.
The Americans on the whole I have found to be an open minded people, I love their attitude and will say they are a breed of master salesmen and marketeers by nature of their exported culture. Their openness to trying things makes them so strong. I learned so much from the American way of doing things, some were good, others bad, but the learning curve was huge.
Hold on, Whats this got to do with building a website I hear you cry….
In part 2 I will break this down and show you the steps we can take to getting this right first time. I felt as part of the blog I would be better served in giving you the background on what led me here, and why my goal is to help as many people as I can to short cut their success.
Whilst guarantees are hard to find, there is a methodology which will help you avoid the mistakes many make and at the worst give you some steps that allow you to make the best decisions for your venture.
The Anarchist Entrepreneur 