When you’re first start out in business you’re probably thinking, “Oh, what should I do?”  And the bottom line is if something’s making you more money than it’s costing, then you should continue to spend it on marketing.  So what I mean by that is, let’s say I’ve got a $200 dollar ad, a $300 dollar ad, a $500 dollar ad… and I can place that $500 dollar ad or spend $500 dollars on Google AdWords and get one or two or $3,000 dollars back?  Why would I ever stop doing that?

Let’s say the other alternative is I’m earning a million dollars a year.  I’ll spend a hundred thousand dollars a year on marketing.  That’s fine, but if that hundred thousand dollars is making you money, like let’s say you’re spending hundred thousand dollars placing an ad in the Sydney newspapers…

What would happen if you also placed ads in the Melbourne and the Perth and the Brisbane newspapers?  All of a sudden if that ad’s making money in Sydney and you place it in all those other newspapers there is no reason why you couldn’t triple or quadruple your business as a result.  But if you stuck in the, “Oh, I must only spend 10 percent of my turnover on marketing,” then you miss out on that massive opportunity.

What should you do if you have placed a lot of ads and nothing has worked?  Well the first thing I would say is that what we’re talking about here is business; it’s not baseball.  It’s not like three strikes and you’re out, game over.  The way business works is it doesn’t matter if you make 18, 12, 20, 30, 50 strikes or how many strikes you make.  You can keep getting up again, keep getting up again, keep getting up again and the key to actually making an ad work is phrasing the ad in the right way.  It’s sort of like being a salesperson and you get someone who’s dressed like a street person and they rack up to a hundred businesses in a row and they’ve got a really bad script and then they go, “Awe, nothing worked.”  Well you’ve got to change things.  You’ve got to put some nice clothes on.  You’ve got to develop a script.  You’ve got to get product knowledge.  You’ve got to approach people in the right way and it’s the same with advertising.

One of the best ways to approach people is to get them to inquire for something with very, very little risk to them.  If you can do that it breaks down the barrier and you can start to develop the relationship very quickly.