How to deal with conflicting business advice

Someone sent in an interesting question today:

“I get a lot of conflicting advice on strategies to grow my online business. What am I supposed to do?”

This drives me crazy. Millions of sites out there promise to help you get rich quickly. “Oh, one week, and you’ll be a millionaire on the beach.” Or they’ll tell you how to earn passive income by doing nothing.

These are the kind of people who post inspirational quotes. You know the kind. They get a lot of likes, and followers. But if they’re always posting stuff like this, their business is probably unprofitable.

I’ll try to help you navigate the mucky waters out there.

Scammy versus authentic

This is an important consideration to make. Are you going to be out there saying, “You need to buy. You need to buy. You need to buy now.” Just ask yourself, would you ever talk to a person in real life like that?

Compare that to authentic, which is you saying, “Look, this is what I struggled with. I tried to do it, it didn’t work. I spent a lot of time testing things. I’m still learning, I’m still a student, but here’s what I’ve discovered, and it helped me earn more, lose weight, become a better husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend.”

Which would you rather listen to and potentially buy from? Someone who’s saying, “Buy this now,” or someone who’s being authentic?

Useless versus artisanal products

Another question to ask yourself is the framework of useless versus artisanal products. Useless. This is what I call all those e-books that are $5, $10, $15, $20. Someone sat in the back of their room and they decided, “You know what, I’m gonna write myself a vacation.”

And they wrote it, and they said, “If I just send this to 5,000 people in XYZ conversion rate, I’ll be rolling in cash.” They didn’t even think about the value of the product, they just literally wanted to write themselves a check for their bank account.

Consider that, and contrast that with an artisanal product. This is something that was painstakingly created. Have you ever gone and seen like a $20 cocktail being made? You just watch them. They actually love it, they care for it. Not just dumping alcohol in there. They’re actually making it with beauty.

Have you ever seen a great piece of art being made? It’s not just throwing paint up there, they’re handcrafting it. Artisanal products are about the beauty of the product, and if you do a great job building that product, then of course the revenue will come. That’s the approach we take here at IWT.

Marketing tactical hell versus deliberate/systematic

And lastly, a final framework. Marketing tactical hell versus deliberate and systematic. Marketing tactical hell is what you hear when you hear people say, “You need to do all these things to get your business growing. You need to be on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, social media, email, webinars.” And you’re just like, “What? Where do I start?” “Do them all.”

Don’t listen to them.

That’s marketing tactical hell, where you’re doing a little bit of everything and going nowhere. Deliberate, methodical, systematic. That’s when you say, “You know what? I’m not gonna do most of those things. I’m gonna pick two of the most important things, and I’m gonna become really, really good at them.”

Here is everything in summary:

Now that I’ve pointed these out to you, it’ll be easier to get started on the right path.

Discover what it takes to turn a blog into a business

It’s not enough to have a blog with a few posts to run a successful online business. You have to learn the strategies and systems that can help you scale an idea to reach hundreds, even thousands of customers.

To help you out, I’ve compiled my lessons in building a multimillion-dollar company from a tiny blog in The Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business.