Were your product sales less than you expected last year? If so, you have to check out this new free video series, Product Marketing Breakthrough, by Andreea Ayers. Andreea started an inspirational t-shirt company, Tees for Change, five years ago and last year she sold it so she could spend more time with her growing family. She was able to get her t-shirts in more than 300 stores and over 200 media outlets, including Self, Shape, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and on TV and celebrities.

Andreea reached six figure sales in her first year of business, so now she works with entrepreneurs who have a product-based business to help them grow their product line.

In her free Product Marketing Breakthrough video series, Andreea shares some tips and strategies to grow your product line, including:

• 3 mistakes that most product entrepreneurs make and how to avoid them
• 4 strategies to get your product line into the spotlight with your customers, retailers, and the media, so you can increase your product sales immediately
• Simple tweaks you can make to your website to get more traffic, leads and sales
• Proven strategies for wholesale, publicity and more.

These videos are a must‐see if you have a great product line, self-published book or idea for a product, but don’t know how to successfully get your product into multiple stores and media outlets.

Click here to start viewing!

I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this post, but the best thing I did for my business in 2011 is focus. This sounds cliche and no-brainer, so here’s specifically what we did this year:

Focus on our own aesthetics
My partner Matt does all the art for Ex-Boyfriend. He’s an incredibly talented illustrator who can do just about anything. This is both good and bad.  If simple lines and minimalism are in, Matt can do it. If detailed line work and heavy shading are hot, Matt can make that happen. Matt’s ability to do just about anything meant we were doing just about everything, and we wanted to stop that. We didn’t want designs that would go out of style as the trends changed, we wanted an aesthetic that would maintain its appeal regardless of the trend du jour.

While each individual piece had its merits, we spent 2011 making our line more cohesive. We stopped pandering to trends and focused on what really excited us. We kept our collection accessible, but we stopped worrying about what people seemed to be buying in general and focused on what we wanted our look to be about.

We absolutely could design stuff with mustaches and feather silhouettes, but we do not want to. We like yetis and space creatures, and we’ve found an audience that likes that too. We want a line inspired by Japanese pop art, 1960s American pop art and modern street art. We like wordplay and designs with a sense of humor that turn convention on its side. Doing what we love has allowed us to better define who we are and stand out from the crowd. It’s helped us connect with our kind of customers and given us a direction forward.

Focus on what’s important
You can make yourself totally crazy chasing the latest marketing tools. There are a ton of choose from and they all have their pros and cons. This year, we picked 3 things that we decided were the most important tools for growing our brand and we focused on them. We experimented with new things here and there, but we made it our mission for the year to do 3 things:
- Find and attend trade shows that attract our target buyers
- Find and attend retail events that attract our target consumer audience
- Get media placements and get our products on TV.

Those sound like big tasks but we made all of them happen this year because we focused on them. We broke each of those items down into smaller tasks, scheduled each of our tasks out and tackled them accordingly. As 2011 closes we’ve got bookings for Pool Trade Show, Chicago Comic Con, and our tees have been seen on The Daily Show and Modern Family (another network TV show has already filmed using our tees and will air in January).

Focus on time management
Managing our time effectively was an essential part of making things happen this year. We scheduled each week out every Sunday night and made a to-do list of every day of the week. Each day had a specific theme to it like publicity or wholesale. We found that trying to work a little on everything meant nothing got done — not enough focus!  Giving each day a theme and an itemized list of deliverables meant stuff was getting done. It also helped cut out all the mid-day “snacking” on tasks that were leading to never finishing a “meal” of a task. When you have your list of what you have to finish today in front of you, it helps you stay away from distractions.

How was your 2011? What were the best things you did for your business?

When you start a creative business it’s natural to ask your friends for input. The trouble with relying on their feedback is that it’s a little like asking them if your baby is cute. Even if it’s the ugliest baby they’ve ever seen, they’re not going to tell you. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. The fact of the matter is, sometimes babies are ugly, and sometimes there are problems with your business that are glaringly obvious to your friends. Here are 3 common things your friends are probably lying about (and what to do about it).

1. Your website
Creating an attractive, user-friendly website is not easy. There’s a reason people spend years getting a degree in graphic design. If everyone could make a great website, the internet would be a whole lot prettier. Those websites that look beautiful were anything but effortless. Most professional websites that you see were designed over weeks or months by a team of professionals. If you think a quick read through HTML for Dummies is going to get you the same results, think again.

The trouble is, when you finish your clashy, tacky, flashy, blinky monstrocity of a site and show it to your friends, they’re not going to tell you it’s bad. They probably aren’t design professionals and even if they know it’s bad, they don’t want to offend you.

The fix:
The best fix is hiring a design professional. There are lots of talented web designers out there who can give you a website to be proud of. If you sell online, that website is going to be the face of your business, so don’t let a bad first impression kill your sales. If your website is a hot mess, customers are going to think your products will be just as shoddy.

If hiring a professional is out, that doesn’t mean using their design work is. Sites such as Template Monster have thousands of pre-made web designs you can purchase. You can even have the themes professionally installed, so you can have a perfectly professional look to your website, without the steep price tag of a custom site. Template Monster has themes for most popular ecommerce programs like osCommerce, Zencart, and Magento. Most themes are under $200.00, and many are even under $100.00

2. Your product photos
The quality of your product photos can make or break your online sales. It doesn’t matter how amazing your products are, if the photos aren’t up to par, customers won’t be buying. Like an ugly website, ugly product pictures don’t engender trust in customers. They’ll think you’re unprofessional and that your products will be cheap and low quality.

Chances are your friends aren’t photographers or experts on selling online, so when they see your product photos they may not be able to critique them properly (and again, they don’t want to hurt your feelings). That doesn’t mean your photos are going to pass muster with customers.

The fix:
Hiring a professional photographer is going to be the safest way to ensure great product photos. They have the proper cameras, lighting and other equipment to get great shots and the experience to stage your products in an appealing way.

If you can’t spring for a professional photographer, get as educated as you can about product photography. Make sure you’re using a good camera. Take cues from professionals about staging product photos (look at catalogs for larger stores for ideas) and shoot with a light box or using natural light.

3. Your products and branding
With so many people trying to start a creative business these days, it’s really hard to compete. To succeed you’ll need terrific products and remarkable branding. You might enjoy stringing beads or knitting scarves, but that doesn’t mean you can start a business with it. Your friends don’t want to be the ones to tell you they’ve seen what you’re doing a million times before, even if they’re thinking it. They also might not be aware of the vast competition out there, so even if they think your items are perfectly nice, they may not understand that several other people are already doing the same thing.

The fix:
You need at least one of two things to stand out in the marketplace: exceptional products or exceptional branding. Ideally, you want both, but plenty of unremarkable products have been saved by clever branding.

Take product lines like Blue Q for example. They sell fairly mundane things like tea bags, but brand them as “Get along with your co-workers tea” and instantly a box that’s no more interesting than a $1.50 12 pack of Lipton becomes a great gag gift for the office that sells for 10 times the price it would fetch in an ordinary box.

If you’re selling something common like soap or mittens, that a zillion other people are selling, you may need to rethink your branding. You have to find some way to position your products in a unique way so people have a good reason to choose your items over the competition.

Take honest stock of what else is out there and really think about what makes your products better and more appealing than the others. Develop a list of benefits and features that your product provides that makes it stand out. If you can’t come up with anything, it’s going to be tough to convince consumers to shop with you instead of someone else.

When you started your creative business, you probably started with a product that played to your creative skills. If you’re an illustrator maybe you started selling prints, if you’re into sewing maybe you started with bags, if you’re a metal-smith you might have started with jewelry. The important thing is not to allow your creative skills to be pigeon-holed into a single medium.

When you’re using your creative talents to run a product-based business, it’s important to think about the products. This means thinking about ways you can apply your talents to products that best serve the marketplace. If you can sew
a bag, maybe you can also sew a wallet or an apron. If you can put your illustrations on prints, maybe they can also go on note cards or calendars. Having a range of products means you can keep your customers coming back for more items more often. It can also generate interest from customers who may not want items in your preferred medium. For example, a consumer might love your art but not have much space in her tiny apartment to hang up lots of prints. If she could buy your art on a mouse pad or notebook, she might place more orders.

In addition to encouraging more repeat sales from existing customers and possibly capturing new customers, additions to your product line offer even more marketing benefits. You can use a product launch as a reason to generate media attention. You can also drive more search traffic to your website. More products means you can optimize for more keywords and bring more people to your online shop. Product diversity can be great for SEO.

So how can you get ideas for diversifying your product line?

1. Holiday Lists
By now you’re probably getting some holiday wishlists from your loved ones. What are people asking for? Do they want an ipad? If so, maybe you can make ipad cases. Do they want magazine subscriptions? Maybe you could make magazine racks. Pay attention to the things people explicitly say they want and think about how you could add a product to your line that would interest them.

2. Competitors
Take note of what kinds of products your competitors are offering. This doesn’t mean you should copy them, but it’s fine to get ideas from them. If other jewelers are doing cufflinks or money clips they’re obviously starting to serve the male market, are there products you could add to your jewelry line to serve the male market?

One nice thing about spying on competitors using Etsy is that you can see not just what they’re offering for sale but what’s actually selling. (By the way, if you sell on Etsy are you sure you want your competitors knowing what your best sellers are?)

Try to look for ways you can improve on what competitors are doing so you aren’t outright copying their product line.

3. Fans
Customer focus groups can be a great way to develop product ideas. Ask your fans what they’d like to see you do next. If you’ve already got some ideas of what you could do, give customers a list to choose from and ask them to vote for their favorite option. Although people don’t always buy the things they say they would, customers can still be a helpful resource for deciding which direction to take.

At Ex-Boyfriend, when we are trying to decide between two ideas we like, we ask our fans for help. We have an invite-only mailing list for our top customers and when we’re trying to decide between two things, we let them be the tie breaker. That way we know we’re talking to people who are likely to shop with us in the future and our biggest fans get to provide input on what we offer next.

4. Existing Products
Look at your existing product line for ideas on how to expand. Could you offer your current items in a wider range of sizes? Could you offer companion items for your existing items? For example, if you sell jewelry could you offer jewelry travel cases or other jewelry storage? If you sell journals, could you offer pen or pencil sets that compliment your journals? If you sell passport cases, maybe your customers would also be interested in luggage tags.

Think in terms of ways you can merchandise your products as gift sets or packages to encourage bigger purchases. For example if you sold a passport case for $10 and a set of luggage tags for $8, you could sell a package of both for $15. You get more money and your customer feels like they got a good deal.

How can you expand your current product offerings to appeal to more customers or encourage more repeat business with existing customers?

If you’ve spent any time around sports fans, then you know it’s a matter of time before they start spouting off about what coaches or players should be doing. Sports fans will talk your ear off for hours about this if you let them, but here’s the thing: the average fan you meet is not a professional player and probably never was. They’ve probably never been involved with any sport in any professional capacity. You can love a game or a team all you want, but if you’ve never actually been on the field, your expertise is questionable.

Why am I talking about sports today? Because I feel the same analogy holds true when it comes to getting advice about your business. The proliferation of blogs about small business and wannabe business coaches over the last couple of years has been astounding. Most of these coaches, like me, came out of the crafty/handmade scene, where they either currently sell their own wares or have tried to in the past.

With so many people spouting advice, how can you tell who you should listen to? Here’s where the sports analogy comes in handy…

The Fans
A lot of the people offering advice online about business are fans. They like the handmade/craft/indie biz community. They may have even dabbled in selling their own wares. This is no different than the baseball enthusiast who’s played a little intramural softball. Just because you’ve tossed the ball around doesn’t make you a pro.

You don’t see the Yankees hiring the loudest guy on NYYFans.com as the head coach. They’re going to hire the guy with the track record and experience. And when it comes to advice for your business, you should follow this lead too. Hire a pro. It’s fine to talk shop with fans, sometimes they have interesting things to say, but they probably aren’t in a position to advise you.

How to spot a fan applying for a job as coach:

• She’s probably tried to run a handmade/indie business before but gave up after it didn’t make enough money for her to live on (if she couldn’t do it for herself, what makes you think she can help you?).
• Her about page uses lots of fuzzy speak about passion and visualizing your success and living out your dreams. These people usually avoid talking about anything too technical, objective, specific or concrete. They’d rather talk about passion, crafting your story or time management instead of conversion rate optimization or what to avoid in your wholesale terms.
• She can’t tell you about any successful business owner she’s coached who saw considerable growth in their business based on her coaching.

Coaches
In professional sports, coaches are usually former professional players. Sometimes you’ll see coaches who didn’t play pro, but they probably at least played in college or minor leagues. In those cases, those coaches worked their way up through the coaching ranks, maybe starting with coaching peewee or high school and then eventually moving on to assistant positions at colleges and finally making their way to coaching the pros. They didn’t get to the pros without a solid track record of wins and successes.

How to spot a pro quality coach:

• She’s got a client list you envy, meaning you want to be as successful as her clients are.
• Her successful clients would recommend her to other business owners.
• She has a consistent track record of improving the businesses she advises in a concrete way. This means she can tell you that a client went from 20 wholesale accounts to 200 as a direct result of her advice, or she can tell you that a client went from no search traffic to top position on Google for relevant keywords and as a result the client saw a 300% increase in sales from search traffic.
• She’s either run her own business (and I don’t meant her coaching business) in the past and sold it for a large sum or she’s a subject matter expert who’s worked in the industry (for example a coach who specializes in wholesale and was a former buyer at major retail chains for many years).

Players
As mentioned above, coaches in professional sports are usually former players. So listening to a professional player’s insights on the game isn’t a bad idea. They’ve been on the ground and know exactly what they did first hand to win. They have insight into the game that fans cannot have. I consider myself in this category, by the way. My primary focus is my own apparel business, but I enjoy geeking out about running my business and like helping others learn from the mistakes I’ve made and successes I’ve had.

How to spot a professional player:

• She’s currently running a profitable and successful business.
• She probably doesn’t coach full time because she’s running her own business, but has enough love for the game that she coaches on the side because she enjoys it and loves talking about it.
• She’s learned what she knows about business by doing. She may not have an MBA, but she’s been where you are and got herself on the right track through trial and error.

If you want to know how to win at business, either talk to someone who’s winning at business or has led other businesses to wins.

A final note about picking your coach
Football teams don’t hire baseball coaches. Basketball teams don’t hire tennis coaches. You need to hire a coach that is an expert in what you’re trying to do. Business models can vary really dramatically. Some businesses make most of their money with online sales. If that’s the kind of business you’re trying to run, don’t hire a coach who’s an expert on wholesale. Some businesses have seen a lot of their success as a result of media placements. If you don’t have the kind of product the press is likely to be really interested in, a coach who knows a lot about media placements can’t help you.

For the most part, it’s safer to avoid generalists. No one is great at everything. Pick your coach based on the specific and concrete set of skills she’s got the most experience with and make sure that experience is in line with what your business needs.

It entrepreneurship was easy, everyone would do it. It helps to have vision or an MBA or be good with numbers, but by far the following trait have served me and my partner best when running our business:

1. Time management
Entrepreneurs are busy people. There will always be more tasks than hours in the day, so it’s critical that you can set priorities and find an efficient way to get things done. You also want to delegate the right tasks to the right people once you start hiring help.

2. Adaptability
Things change almost daily for entrepreneurs. You run into problems with shipments, some new law passes that bans a manufacturing ingredient you need, a major buyer goes out of business, some new technology becomes all the rage in your industry.

To keep your business afloat, you’ll need to be the sort of person who can roll with the punches and tackle whatever comes your way. If you’re the kind of person who becomes set in your ways, hates to learn new things or freaks out in a crisis, you’re going to find your job extremely difficult.

3. Determination
Stuff is going to go wrong and you’re going to deal with aggravation and naysayers. If you are the sort that gives up on things easily, entrepreneurship is not for you. You have to be the kind of person that believes they can do anything no matter what and will find a way to make things work.

4. Genial and Outgoing Nature
You might think being self-employed means you no longer have to work well with others, but that’s far from true. As an entrepreneur you’ll probably work with more people than you ever did as an employee. You’ll need to interact with customers, vendors, and peers.

You’ll come to really depend on personal relationships with people you meet through your work. The ability to talk to people and make people like you and want to help you is critical. If you’re a wallflower or a grouch you’re going to have a tough time.

Being outgoing and friendly doesn’t come naturally for everyone. I usually see more scowls and hunched shoulders at craft shows than smiles and warm greetings. This is a real shame because being able to charm people makes a difference in your sales. It’s important to get out and practice interacting with people if this isn’t something you’re comfortable with.

How about you, what qualities have served you well as an entrepreneur?

P.S. There are still a few spots left for the holiday season ad co-op! Secure your spot today before space sells out!

When it comes to publicity, I’ve got pretty strong feelings. It’s really helped my apparel company grow by leaps and bounds in the last 18 months. We can attribute tens of thousands of dollars in sales in this year alone directly to media placements. The road to getting here wasn’t easy.

When my partner and I started, we didn’t know much about publicity. We knew we wanted some, but we didn’t know how to go about getting it. We tried hiring a publicity firm. We looked at their resume of happy clients and impressive placements and imagined they could produce these results for us. Several months and thousands of dollars later, they’d come up empty and we got rid of them.

What went wrong with hiring the “experts”?
A lot went wrong with bringing in the publicity experts we hired. To begin with, they weren’t a fit for our brand. Our company is much more MTV and their other clients were much more Lifetime. They’d never worked with a brand like ours and rather than being straight with us and declining our business, they took our money and delivered no results.

The more surprising thing about the experts is that they weren’t actually all that expert. Their approach to pitching our products was to spam every media outlet under the sun with off-topic pitches. For example, they’d create a press release with a tee featuring a cupcake on it and send that to 1,000 media contacts, hoping someone would bite. Never mind that some of those contacts were tech publications who might’ve actually written about our brand if they’d been directed towards our geekier products. Meanwhile, pitching bridal magazines every few weeks was a waste of everyone’s time. They were never going to write about us, their readers weren’t our market.

So much for experts.

Back to the Drawing Board
After we fired our “experts” we decided to go the DIY route with our publicity. If we didn’t succeed, at least we weren’t laying out $1,000/month on the endeavor. We tried to arm ourselves with as much information as possible. We read blogger opinions on being pitched. We read publicist blogs. We really did our homework, and then we started pitching.

As time went on, we got good at pitching — really good. We were regularly landing placements with high profile major media outlets and the cash was rolling in. People were starting to become aware of our brand. Our search engine rankings were climbing. We grew enough that our company went from part-time hobby to my partner’s full time job.

Hitting a Wall
Publicity is like a drug, once you get a taste you realize you can’t do without it and you always need more. The problem is getting more takes time and our business was growing, that meant we couldn’t just spend all day pitching. We had other parts of the business to work on. We needed more hours in the day, we needed help.

For a while, we tried to make things work entirely on our own. We worked 70 hour weeks. We tried various prioritization strategies and time management. No matter what, we felt under the gun. We knew we couldn’t go back to hiring a PR firm. At this point, we were really good at doing our own PR and we were the experts. We needed another “me”.

Hiring the Right Help
My partner and I were obsessed with the idea of “finding another me”. “If only we could clone ourselves” we’d lament. We needed someone who would do exactly what we were doing to get placements. Then we realized, we don’t need an expert, we need a blank slate. A person with PR experience would have her own ideas about how to get us press and we didn’t need that. We knew what was working, we just needed someone to do things our way.

With that revelation in mind, we brought on our publicist. The person we ended up hiring was young, with little in the way of any kind of professional experience. When we picked her we only cared about a few qualities. She needed to be personable and outgoing. She needed spelling and grammar skills that wouldn’t embarrass us. Above all, she needed to be totally willing to do things exactly the way we told her to do them.

For the first few weeks, our new publicist shadowed my partner. She studied him as he called wardrobe departments at TV shows, sent pitch emails to bloggers, sleuthed out editorial contact information in LinkedIn. Then, we slowly had her begin working on her own contacts. She’d write emails to send to media outlets and run them by my partner before hitting send. She’d make calls to contacts, with my partner sitting there to coach her if she got stuck on a question.

By the end of her first month, our new publicist had our products in the hands of Hollywood costume departments we’d had on our to-pitch list since the start of the year. Having her attention dedicated to our PR efforts has allowed her to make consistent major headway and it’s allowed my partner to turn his attention back to other logistical and creative tasks.

A Shift in Hiring Philosophy
Before I had a business (A.K.A. before I knew anything about this stuff), I always imagined you’d grow by hiring the experts. They had the experience and they’d know what to do to make the business grow. I don’t believe this any more. I will hire experts for a few areas of our business like legal, IT and accounting, beyond that we probably won’t hire any more “experts”.

The trouble with “experts” is they know what worked for other clients or other businesses, but you have to be the expert on YOUR business. Growing a business is like raising a child, the same rules don’t work for every kid and the same approach won’t work for every business. Surrounding ourselves with people who “get” our business is our new mantra.

We are expecting to fill a few more positions in the coming months and we won’t be looking for experienced pros. We’ll be looking for enthusiastic, smart people who can follow directions and want to learn. We don’t want or need them to have experience or be experts in sales or events or whatever other position we’ll be filling. We’ll provide the expertise because we’ve done those tasks for our business. All we need them to bring is those extra hours in our day.

Running a business is crazy expensive. The bigger your business gets the more you’re going to spend. At Ex-Boyfriend, we spend tens of thousands of dollars every year on keeping our shop running. We buy manufacturing materials, pay our vendors, buy event supplies, buy marketing materials, pay for services like credit card processing and web hosting, etc. The list of expenses is nearly endless. With so much money flying out the door, it’s important to spend wisely. Here are a few strategies we employ:

1. Buy in serious bulk
When it comes to certain purchases, more is better. If you’re buying custom mailers, promotional materials, manufacturing supplies, etc. most vendors will give you better pricing if your order is larger. For example the vendor who makes our pens with our logo on them charges 46 cents per pen if I buy 100 pens. They only charge 12 cents per pen if I buy 5,000 of them. While buying 5,000 pens costs me more up front, my savings is considerable for buying a bulk quantity.

Cheap tip: If you don’t have the cash to buy in bulk, see if you can split the order with another small business. For example, if someone making 1″ promotional buttons charges 25 cents/pin for 100 pins but 10 cents/pin for 1,000 pins, see if the pin maker can do two different pin designs. Then find a partner to share the order with. That way you can have 500 pins for your business and your partner can have 500 pins for her business, and you both end up paying only 10 cents per pin. Some vendors may be more inclined to do this than others, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

2. Comparison shop
The internet makes it easier than ever to comparison shop. Whether you need wholesale catalogs, sewing machines, or shipping supplies, you can soften the blow to your budget by finding the best price. Do a Google search for the item you want to buy and see who’s got it for less. Also be sure to check sites like Amazon, since they have such a huge selection of items.

Lastly, if you are ordering supplies online, make sure you include things like coupons and shipping in your cost estimates. Sometimes the price that seems better actually isn’t once you look at those factors.

3. Get rewards
When you’re spending serious bucks on your business, it pays to use a credit card that gives you something back. Consider getting a credit card that gives you rewards like cash back, airline miles, etc. You can use those rewards to get free stuff for your business or even a treat for yourself. To really game this system you need to follow these rules:

1. ALWAYS pay off your balance in full every month. If you’re going to pay interest on purchases you won’t come out ahead with a rewards card. I can appreciate a cash flow problem as much as the next girl, but if you must finance a purchase on a credit card don’t do it with a miles card, they tend to have higher interest rates. Instead use a card that has the lowest interest rate you can find.

2. Use your card constantly. The way to maximize rewards is by using the heck out of that miles card. That means you put every single purchase on there. I don’t care of it’s a brand new Macbook Pro or a cup of coffee, every dollar counts. If you can’t be consistent with the use of your miles card, you won’t reap the full benefits.

3. Don’t overspend. This does back to rule number 1, don’t spend more money than you have. Otherwise you won’t be able to pay your balance every month and you’ll be charged interest. For some people this requires serious discipline. Don’t think of the credit card as extra cash, think of it as tied to the sum of money in your budget/bank account and don’t spend more than you can afford. Again, if you need to make a purchase you don’t have the cash for right now, use the credit card with the lowest interest rate.

One question I often hear from small business owners is “How do I get more [traffic/newsletter subscribers/Facebook Likes/etc.]?” This is a terrible question. You do not just want more. What you actually want is more targeted traffic, more targeted subscribers, more Facebook likes. etc.

Here’s why quality is more important than quantity:

1. More wastes money
In your mindless pursuit of more, you’re probably going to waste money.

When you fixate on “more” you do dumb things:
- You’ll flier every car in a parking lot, even if 99.9999% of them are going to see your fliers as trash (thus you wasted money/time on fliers).

- You’ll pay $100 for 10,000 Facebook fans. Of course, those Facebook fans are going to be junk accounts that will never buy anything.

- You’ll waste your time collecting email subscribers that will never convert, and your inflated email list size will cost more to maintain. (Most email service providers charge you based on how many emails you send. You are better off paying Mail Chimp $10/month for 500 really engaged email subscribers instead of paying $50/month for 5,000 junk subscribers who are never going to buy anything.)

- You’ll waste money on bandwidth fees to your website for junk traffic from Nigeria that will never buy what you’re selling.

Do not waste your time or money simply acquiring more. It’s not more advertising, traffic, subscribers, etc. that will make you money. It’s targeted advertising, traffic, etc. that will make you money. You are better off with 50 new email subscribers who love you than 500 who couldn’t care less.

2. More distorts your metrics
When you assess your marketing activities, you should be taking a macro view of performance. Then you make tweaks to your marketing based on your metrics. If your metrics are distorted by low quality traffic and leads, you’ll make the wrong assumptions. Here are some examples of what I mean by this:

- If you want to determine which email subject line was better, you send out two versions and check to see which version got more opens. If you have a junk list with unengaged subscribers, your open rate is going to be too low to give you a statistically useful result.

- If you want to work on conversion rate optimization (making changes to your site to get a larger percentage of visitors to buy), you’ll want to test different versions of product photos, product pages and checkout pages to see which ones convert more sales. If 99% of your site visitors are bots or humans who aren’t your target market, your conversion rate is going to seem rock bottom. You’ll waste your time chasing your tail on conversion rate optimization when the real problem is traffic quality.

In short, when you want to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts, you need to look at the right metrics. If you are trying to evaluate a marketing effort that assumes you have a qualified audience, you’ll false blame the marketing effort when you should be blaming your lead generation efforts.

3. More doesn’t give you the social proof you think it does
If you think having more fans, more followers, more likes, etc. in the social media universe will make you seem more credible, think again. Whether you’re trying to impress prospective retail customers, competitors or wholesale buyers, chances are this ruse won’t work.

Anyone looking to your social media presence as a measure of social proof isn’t just looking at numbers, they are looking at engagement. If you’ve got 10,000 Facebook fans and not a one has commented on or liked your posts, it’s going to be pretty obvious your following isn’t sincere. Don’t waste your time on these tactics. People will be far more impressed with an engaged following than a sizable one.

How to get quality instead of quantity:

1. Know your target market
You can’t get better traffic, social media followers, subscribers, etc. if you don’t know what better is. Better means people who are likely to buy your stuff (A.K.A. your target demographic). You need to know who is likely to buy your stuff before you can market to them. So think about who your ideal customers are. If you don’t know where to start on this, I’ve got some tips here and here.

2. Go fishing where there are fish
Once you know who your target demographic is, it’s important to start doing your marketing where they hang out. If your marketing is parents with small children, start advertising on Mommy Blogs and try to hit them up for editorial mentions. If your ideal customer is a comic book fan, see if you can leave fliers in your local comic book shop and start attending comic conventions.

3. Give quality to get quality
If your brand, website, products, content, social media presence, product photos or blog is junk you’re going to get junk. Engaged fans come from delivering serious quality. This means you need to deliver your A game with every aspect of your business. You need branding that people adore. You need high quality products and beautiful product photos. You need an engaging blog and social media presence. You need qualities that make you both unique and adorable in the marketplace. (And by adorable I don’t mean cute, I mean something people fall in love with.)

If you’re posting murky gray product pics shot on a dirty living room rug and constantly tweeting “BUY MY STUFF!! HUGE SALE!!!!” you can’t expect an army of devoted fans to form. People get passionate about great things. If you can’t deliver greatness, you can’t expect passion.

Have you ever looked at a competitor’s Etsy store and wondered how the heck they are selling hundreds of items every month? Their products seem to be totally unremarkable and yet they’re selling a ton of items. Maybe you’ve checked out their Facebook page and seen that it’s teeming with thousands of rabid fans. What the fuck!? You know your products are better, so why is your competitor kicking your ass?

Chances are your competitors’ success has little to do with his or her products. Your competitor could practically be selling excrement in a box and still have these results. He or she is succeeding because he or she is a good marketer. If you’re fixating on what’s so magical about the competitors’ products, stop it. Focus on what he or she is doing to market successfully, that’s probably where the sales are coming from.

Are there people who have a remarkable product, suck at marketing and manage to sell successfully. Occasionally, but it’s not the norm. And we’ve certainly seen people with terrible products who are such rock star marketers, that they’re selling stuff left and right, even if the stuff is nothing special. Selling your product successfully is mostly about marketing. This is why lots of great designers fail, and lots of hacks succeed.

What can you do about it?

1. Realize that marketing is going to make or break your business.
Having a great product will help you, but if the marketing isn’t as good as the product, the product doesn’t really matter. Marketing is one of the most important things you’ll do with your business. You’re competing for awareness with everyone, not just direct competitors. Every minute a potential customer spends looking at an ad for a bank, reading a website promoting a fitness product, etc. is a minute they are not engaging with your brand. There are only so many minutes in the day. If you can’t find a way to get your brand in front of people for some share of their minutes in the day, you’re not going to succeed. People can’t fall in love with a brand if they’re unaware that it exists.

(Looking for more ways to be seen? Check out the back to school advertising co-op.)

2. Pick 3 things
There are a ton of ways you can market your business, but you can’t do them all at once, so you have to prioritize. Pick 3 big things you consider essential to the success of your marketing — these things could be viral marketing, SEO, social media, publicity, etc. Then make a plan to make those things a priority. If you decide getting on page 1 of Google’s search results for certain keywords is what’s necessary, make a plan to do that. If you decide that getting a massive following on Youtube is what’s going to help you, figure out how you’re going to make that a reality.

Study your competitors and try to determine what’s making their marketing work. Are they getting a ton of press? Are they doing live events every weekend? Do they have their products in hundreds of stores? Are they dominating on Google? Do they have millions of followers on Twitter? If you study them closely, you’ll start to get some ideas about how they market. Follow them on social media. Join their newsletter. You’ll start to see some clues emerge on how they promote, and you can use this information to decide if those techniques would work for you.

Need help picking your 3 things? My Marketing Plan ebook helps you break down various marketing techniques and assess them based on objective ROI metrics, so you can make an informed decision about what your priorities should be.

3. Come up with a plan and follow through
Once you’ve picked the big things you’ve decided are important to your marketing plan, break each one into small actionable tasks you can take on each day. Give yourself deadlines and stick to them, then evaluate the results you’re seeing to decide if you want to stay on course or adjust your priorities.