[thelist] Online Marketing Resource

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Fri Jan 7 09:47:00 CST 2011


On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:24 PM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote:
>> that there is a giant can o' worms. everyone will spend the rest of their
>> lives debating how to measure which growth came from the marketing guru and
>> which was going to happen anyway.
>
> Thought of that--he is willing to make a second site (unique URL) and
> then 100% of sales from that site would be attributed to the marketer.
> 50% of $10K I would think is not bad. 50% of a year's sales I think
> would at least be incentive enough for a marketer to put some effort
> into it--the profits would then (in theory) be directly correlated to
> his success. Perhaps not, however.

Why would you start over with a new site?

You can't set up an agreement like this based on profit, because
profit is completely in the control of the owner. If he wants to
reduce his "profit", all he needs to do is give himself a raise. In
fact, I know a small business who makes sure every year to have a
"profit" of zero. They pay no corporate income tax and simply
distribute a bonus to all 10-15 employees on 12/31.

So, putting an agreement like this together based on profit is
basically saying: you do some marketing, and I pay you whatever I feel
like paying you.

Your friend has stated that he believes that the KEY (your words) to
taking his business to the next level is marketing. Really? Because
this contraction arrangement sounds like he isn't too confident. Why
is he hedging like crazy against something he believes is the KEY to
growing his business? Very odd.

If he's paying the bills and paying himself and there's $10k left over
each year (that is not much to work with, by the way), then put
$2-3k/month into marketing in a highly prioritized, barebones manner.
He'll have a few months to see whether he's getting more requests for
information, more interest, more traffic. I don't agree that he should
be looking at whether he is getting MORE SALES, because his sales
process might be flawed (in which case marketing won't help) or the
marketing ramp up time + sales cycle might be too long to see a
measurable effect in that timeframe.

If I were contacted by your friend to do this work with this
arrangement, I would say no. If he truly believes marketing is
important to grow his business, he needs to have some skin in the
game. He is either WRONG about marketing being the key to his
business, or else HE is the problem in being too conservative.

-- 
Matt Warden
Austin, TX, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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