“Help! My click through rate is going down!”

A number of questions came up this week on the topic of open and click-through rates.

If you’re new, open rate refers to the percentage of people who open an email you send.

Click-through rate refers to the percentage of people who click on a link in that email.

First, and you need to be aware of this, both of these numbers are completely unreliable in any kind of absolute way. If your newsletter says your open rate is 50%, that’s not actually even kind of true. It cannot be accurately measured, no matter what song and dance routine your autoresponder software goes through to convince you otherwise.

The only reason we care about open rate and click-through rate is in a relative way. Are your open rates generally going down, going up, or staying the same?

Is your click-through rate is usually 4% but today it was 2%? Well, it looks like you missed the mark on today’s email.

Is it usually 4% but today it was 12%? More like this one, sweetie!

With me so far? Percentage rates = relative. Cool? Cool.

Now that’s all well and good, but it leads to a very natural problem.

If Monday’s click-through rate was 4% and Tuesday’s was 3% and Wednesday’s was 2% – that looks bad, right? Houston, we have a problem?

Well, yes and no.

Usually, yes. It’s bad. If you send an email with a link to Monday’s blog post and 4% of your people click, and then you send an email linking to Tuesday’s blog post and 3% of your people click, and then Wednesday gets 2% – well, yeah. It’s looking like people kind of hate your blog. Sorry, dude.

BUT!

That’s not when it usually happens.

Let’s say you’re having a sale.

On Monday, you send a big ol’ hoopla email with a killer subject line saying NOM NOM NOM SALE or some such thing. I, having never heard of this sale, say, “Sale? I like sales. Maybe I should open this email.”

Once inside, I see your delightful copywriting antics and say, “Maybe I’ll click.”

I click, I look around, I decide I’ll think about it later. (That’s foreshadowing, by the way.)

So that counts as an open and a click.

On Tuesday, you send a medium hoopla email with a medium killer subject line. I, being distracted, absent-mindedly open it anyway, forgetting that I already know what’s inside. Once I open it, I remember that I already know what’s inside, and I do not click.

My brother, on the other hand, wasn’t in his inbox on Monday, and this is the first HE has heard of it. He opens and he clicks, just like I did on Monday.

As the week goes on, more and more people have already opened and clicked, meaning they’re NOT going to open again, or they’re not going to click again.

By Thursday, only a few people are opening and clicking anything – generally those who are thinking very hard about buying, or those who have been on vacation all week.

Nearing the end of your promotional period, your open rate and your click-through rate drop like a rock.

“OK, Naomi. Hang on just a second here. You always say everybody buys at the end. How can they buy if they don’t click?”

Well, aren’t YOU clever for asking such an insightful question?

After all of this Monday Tuesday business happens, we come to the end of the sale and you send an email saying, “Today is the last day.”

What happens?

Everyone who is even marginally interested opens AND clicks. It’s get-it-or-regret-it time, baby. Open rate and click-through rate shoot back up. Yay!

So your open and click-through rates start moderately high, they go down, they go down more, they go down to the point where you’re well and truly terrified, and then they spike.

So if your open and click-through rates are dropping in the middle of a promotion, that is TOTALLY normal and there’s nothing you should do about it. Who clicks on the same link four days in a row? Nobody, that’s who.

So don’t worry about it. Just be damn clear that the last day is the last day, and your open and click-through rates will go right back up again.

Cool? Cool.

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When you must never, ever, EVER use video

I was shopping for a professional service the other day.

There were about 10 options, and I had narrowed down my choices to two.

It was time to decide. Someone was about to get a few thousand of my dollars.

I go back to option A’s website to make my final choice.

I click on the services page.

Here’s what I see:

“Click on the video below to see what services we offer.”

That’s it. Just a video.

Game over. Option B gets my money.

When you are transmitting critical information, you cannot do it exclusively by video (or audio). You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

Why?

Because a lot of people won’t watch videos.

They won’t watch them because they’re concerned about their bandwidth, or they won’t watch them because they’re on their work computer, or they won’t watch them because their kids are awake, or they won’t watch them because it takes too long. (Usually, it’s the last one.)

Some people simply will not watch. They will then not get the critical information, and away they go to your competition.

What counts as critical information?

Something you couldn’t remove and still keep the integrity of the structure.

Price. Format. Deliverables. Key pieces of sales copy. Anything you couldn’t take out and still do the job.

If I told you the number of times clients showed me their sales page and I said, “Wait, what about [whatever is missing]?” and they’ve responded, “It’s in the video”, you wouldn’t believe me.

This is totally insane. Go find whoever told you this was okay and throw spaghetti at them.

Now, if you have non-critical information, you are welcome to put it exclusively in video. (Testimonials are a good example of this.)

If you have critical information and it also exists clearly and obviously in text, you are welcome to ALSO put it in video.

But you CANNOT have video be the only method of communicating critical information.

People will simply leave. Not all of them, no. But unless you have a religious or philosophical reason to refuse money from people who don’t share your love of YouTube, you are throwing money out of your car window.

Yes. There is ONE exception.

If you ONLY sell products that are ONLY videos, you can do whatever you want.

If you sell video training and only video training, then you don’t really care if I don’t see the critical stuff because I would never buy anything from you anyway.

But!

If this is a video training product and you also sell things that are not video training products, you still have to put it in text.

Because if you want my money for other stuff later, you don’t want to alienate me today.

Capisce?

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As Soon As You Care, You Lose, or The Difference Between Hungry and Starving

Non-attachment is a pretty big thing for the Buddhists. The nice kids at Wikipedia define non-attachment as “freedom from lust, craving and desires.” The basic idea here is that when you’re lusting after something — a person, a thing, even a concept — you suffer. You also tend to do a lot of stupid, crazy things in response.

You suffer while you’re lusting after it and you suffer when you see someone else who has it and you even suffer when you have it because you might lose it at any time.

Non-attachment is all well and good, but it’s pretty hard to achieve. I’m fairly attached to my husband, for example. If he were to up and walk out, I don’t think I would handle it very well. I’m attached to this business. If it blew up in front of my eyes, I’d probably be pretty pissed. If my dog were to get hit by a bus, I can pretty safely say that the first words out of my mouth would not be, “So it goes.”

So while it’s probably a good idea to reduce the number of things to which you are fanatically attached, it’s unreasonable to expect a normal, flawed, non-monk to achieve this feat on any kind of a regular basis.

I saw a lot of begging at a conference I recently attended. It wasn’t begging for stuff. It was begging for love and approval and acceptance. Love and approval and acceptance are good. The love and approval and acceptance you have to beg for are not.

One particular instance stood out in my mind. I overheard someone pretty desperately saying, “I just can’t let them think that I’m just a ___________! I have to explain it to them!” They went on to think about the ways they could improve their elevator pitch so that people would know exactly how awesome their offering was. And I imagined them tracking someone down and pinning them to the wall while they explain, crazed-lunatic style, exactly who they are and exactly what they do. Yikes.

Elevator speeches freak me out a little bit, actually. As the number of people trying to throw their panties at you increases, the number of super spiffy elevator pitches increases, too. Sometimes I long for people to just cut to the chase and say what they do.

Because when you think about it, a perfectly honed answer to “what do you do?” sounds a little contrived. A little artificial. And a little “I spend more time thinking about how to tell people what I do than I do actually doing it”.

I think about meeting Richard Branson at a party. (Yes, of course I think about this. Don’t you?) And I think about what I would say to him. I imagine asking him what he does for a living. And I imagine him answering, “I run a company called Virgin.” If I were to imagine myself at a party with Bill Gates, which for the record I do not, I would imagine I’d imagine him saying, “I run a software company.” (Yes, that was an all-out butchery of the English language. I just want to make it very clear that I don’t spend my time dreaming up party chatter with Bill Gates. Branson, yes. Gates, no.)

Dick and Bill don’t care what you think. They’re not going to be an jerk to you, I hope, but they’re not there to beg for your approval or your business, either. They’re there to go to a party.

I like hungry people. I do. I like the hustle, the fire, the drive. They remind me of me back when I was idealistic.

Starving people make me uncomfortable. They make me want to turn away. They remind me of me back when I was, well, starving.

Hungry people want you to date them. Starving people need you to date them.

Hungry people want a sandwich. Starving people need a sandwich.

Hungry people want you to do business with them. Starving people need you to do business with them.

When you’re hungry, you would like a certain outcome, but you’re not going to do something awful or demeaning or immoral to get it. When you’re starving, all bets are off. Starving people are wearing a big, neon shirt that says, “LOOSE CANNON”.

Do not corrupt yourself to secure a guest post slot. (It will never do what you think it’ll do for you anyway.) Do not compromise what’s important to you to gain a new client. (The clients you have to turn yourself into knots for are usually the jerks.) And do not ruin a perfectly good party begging for approval from the cool kids. (They’re not that cool.)

And cut yourself some slack on the elevator pitch.

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How Many Packages Should You Offer?

Coaches face a problem that a lot of other business types don’t have to deal with – how many options to offer to clients. If you’re producing products, the answer is relatively simple – you sell the number of things you have available to sell. (It can get tricky when you start having too many things, but that’s not a problem you face at the beginning.)

But when you’re a coach, you get the tricky part right from the start. Your “product” tends to be something along the lines of talking to people one-on-one about a particular issue they’re facing. If you’ve got a wide range of experience, there’s probably a lot of things you can do for clients.

However, slapping up a page saying “There are a lot of things I can do for you” doesn’t exactly have a high probability of getting a Visa card out of a wallet. Your potential client is just going to stare at their screen with glazed eyes, wondering what in the hell that even means for them.

Now, to be fair, if you’re already Very Well Known, you can do this. That’s because if you’re Very Well Known, you’ve got two things on your side.

First, people have heard of you, and they’ve probably heard specific things about you. You did X for this client, and Y for this client, and Z for this other client who had a really weird situation.

Second, at that point your reputation may be so established that a client can assume that whatever their problem is, you can handle it. That’s a good place to be.

But if you’re not at that place yet, you’ve got a job on your hands. You have to give your potential clients an easy way to figure out exactly what it is they’re going to give you money to help you with.

The answer to that question is pretty much the same answer we give to almost every question that comes across the desk – “It depends.” It depends on a lot of factors – the industry you’re in, how well established you are, how mainstream your coaching niche is (i.e., people’s preconceptions of what a coach like you should be offering in the first place), what your price points look like – and about a bamillion other factors.

Balancing a bamillion factors is hard. Fortunately, you don’t really have to think about every single one of them if you just fall back on what they all have in common – the experience that the client is going to have in choosing why they want to work with you.

In other words, the whole reason a coaching package, or offer, or whatever you want to call it even exists is this: to help the client feel more comfortable about a buying decision.

That’s the most important part of this post, so let’s cue up the red text and say it again:

A lot of coaches are taught that the way to get clients in the door is to make things as sexy as possible. Big promises. Tons of hyper testimonials. Sexy numbers and names dropped as often as possible. (Also, acronyms. And alliteration. See what I did there?)

You can certainly go that route. I hear that it can work, for certain clients. But I always prefer to fall back on things that would stand a higher than average chance of working with just about anybody.

And one of those things can be summed up as “make it easy for the customer to know what they’re getting without overwhelming them.”

People want to have as many decisions taken off the table as is reasonably possible. They may want a lot of choices, but they don’t want unlimited choices. Even if you’ve heard they do.

When a client considers you as a coach they might want to hire, what they want from your offers is enough detail to help them get their bearings, and not so much detail that they get overwhelmed.

If you’re not providing enough detail, it’s going to drive them insane. “We can talk about whatever you want” is not a coaching offer. It’s tossing them to the wind. When presented with limitless choices, most people make no choice at all.

Show them examples of payment options and payment plans. Let them know that you do one-off calls as well as three- and six-month packages. Don’t make them have to guess or choose for themselves, because the majority simply won’t.

Every piece of clarity and specificity you offer will help them get their bearings and think about what kind of thing they want. They need those bearings to begin getting comfortable with the idea that you’re going to take very good care of them.

The same goes for the types of services you offer. “Help in this area of expertise” is not going to get them past the vague, wispy space they’re in before they decide to commit to getting assistance from you.

But if that’s what you’re offering, you’re basically like a doctor who hangs up a sign that says “If you’re not feeling quite right, I can help you do something about that.” It’s a rare bird who is going to get off their couch and go to that doctor. There’s nothing to latch on to.

If you’ve made it clear which specific services you offer, and given them details – real details – about what each of those specific services entail, then you’ve got a much higher chance of getting and keeping their attention.

But it’s easy to go overboard on this, too. We’ve seen plenty of coaches who offer ten different kinds of services, and they end up shooting themselves in the foot there. Once you get into offering more than a handful of options, there can simply be too much to choose among.

You run the risk of having so many options they would like to get, that picking one would force them to give up on all the other ones that look so juicy. To protect against that feeling of loss, people tend to bail. You don’t want that.

When in doubt, offer three types of packages. People can easily wrap their heads around that number. If all three packages seem appealing, it doesn’t hurt as much to have to make the decision on just one. They can look at three ways you can offer you help and they won’t feel overwhelmed.

(Aside: Generally speaking, any individual person will always pick the same package, no matter what they’re buying. They’ll buy the entry level package, saying they can increase it later. They’ll buy the middle package, because it’s the safest route. Or they’ll buy the biggest package, because then they know they’re getting the best. If someone buys your middle package, the odds are good that they bought the middle package at the cable company and the gym as well.)

Same goes for commitment options. Three package types. One-off sessions, three-month, six-month – you can’t go too wrong with that. It doesn’t really matter what you offer as long as you’re keeping it manageable.

Keep in mind here that we’re talking about a “when in doubt” scenario. If you have a good, solid reason to break away from the rule of three, and you feel confident that the reason will make decision-making easier for the client, then run with that.

But in general, only having one option, or having more than five is likely to cause your potential client to have to think too hard about what it is they want to get from you.

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“Ack!! When should I tell my list?”

Here’s a question we’ve had a lot over the last few weeks. (Fellow blogger writer consultant types – have you noticed how these things tend to cluster? Is that just me?)

Somebody with a small to moderate following and a small to moderately popular blog has something happen in their personal life. Experience says this is almost always a divorce, but this month’s examples also include a pregnancy and a significant change in personal direction.

Because this event seems like – and in reality, often is – the biggest thing to happen in recent memory, we want to tell the people we know. This is what a few million years of living in tribes will do to you. When you get pregnant, every other cave woman wants to know why she hasn’t been told already.

When you run an online business, there’s a very good chance that a large part of your social interaction comes from the internet. The intimacy you have with your clients, your customers, and even your blog readers or newsletter subscribers often surpasses the intimacy you share with people you know locally.

Adding to that, we are often pseudo-social with people, online or otherwise, in ways that are not particularly authentic. If you haven’t seen somebody around in a while, you’re likely to ask where they’ve been, regardless of whether or not you’re actually interested. We were raised to believe it is the polite thing to do.

You, to group: Hi.

Relative stranger in group: Oh my GOD!!! I haven’t seen you in forever! Where have you been? What’s going on?

If this is your best friend from high school, they probably do actually care about where you’ve been and what’s going on in your life. But in most cases, we say these things to people whether we have an affection for them or not. It’s a social contract.

Because of all of this, if you leave social media for a few days, or you stop blogging as frequently for a few months, you’re going to get emails or Facebook notifications that read something like this:

“Oh my GOD!!! I haven’t seen you in forever! Where have you been? What’s going on?”

As you go through this significant change in your life – your divorce, your crisis of faith, your infertility treatments and subsequent pregnancy, whatever – you’re going to get a handful of those emails. And then, the next time you and I are on the phone, you’re going to ask me…

Here is the answer.

Tell your list when there is a valid business reason to do so.

It is a nearly inescapable facet of human nature, the thinking that others really want, or need to know what’s going on in our lives. We think this way not because we are selfish and solipsistic beings – well, not only because we are selfish and solipsistic beings, anyway. We think this way because other people tell us outright that they want or need to know what’s going on in our lives.

The challenging thing to realize as an ittybiz owner is that while your email list is friendly, they are not your friends.

And while a small percentage of them are extremely friendly, the rest of them you couldn’t pick out of a police line-up. They’re not even kind of your friends.

You only hear from the 1% that are extremely friendly. This, naturally, gives you a distorted view of the list as a whole. The 99% who just read your blog or subscribe to your newsletter are people whose names you will probably never know.

Other than the small handful of people you know online who are legitimately your friends – these are the people whose home phone numbers are in your iPhone contacts and would not think it was weird in the slightest for you to call them on a weekend – none of these people are friends. They are not granted the same access as your friends, no matter how friendly they are.

Think of it like this. When you work in an office, there might be a few people who are your genuine friends. Those people get told you’re having a baby or getting divorced or engaged in a crisis of faith when you would tell your friends. This probably means right away, and privately. They get the drama, the blow-by-blow, the dirty details.

Then there are the people who are friendly to you, but not remotely your friends. Your direct supervisor, your contact in HR or billing. You laugh and joke in the break room, but they’re not friends. Those people get told when they need to know, and when any drama has passed.

Then there are the people who you don’t really know at all. You know their name, but only because it’s written on the sign on their desk. Those people are never told outright, but pick it up through contextual evidence after the fact. When you haven’t been to the office for a year and come back bleary-eyed, they assume you had a baby.

The media has conditioned us to believe that the public needs to know. We can thank the National Enquirer for that one.

If you’re running a business, the public only needs to know when they need to know. That is usually never if the news is bad, and after the fact if the news is good.

If you’re on your chiropractor’s mailing list and they’re going to be off from September to December because they had a baby, this is something you need to know.

If you’re on your chiropractor’s mailing list and their mother died, or they got divorced, or they rediscovered their Jewish heritage – or, God help us, they’re wondering if chiropractic is really for them after all – you never need to know.

So, since you’re not a chiropractor, what should you do?

If you are running a pure personality brand – you’re a mommy blogger, for example – then yes, tell people as soon as you want. They’re reading to get a behind-the-scenes look at your life, and only to get a behind-the-scenes look at your life. If that’s you, though, you probably knew that already.If you’re not going to be running the workshop you always run because you’re going to be on maternity leave, by all means, tell them that. They need to know that the workshop schedule is changing, and babies are nice.If you’re not going to be running the workshop you always run because you’re too messed up after your divorce, tell them that the December workshop is cancelled and for the love of God, leave it at that. Resist the urge to give any reason at all. Nobody cares.If you have something that nobody needs to know but they might find interesting and you feel like working the information into existing communications as an interesting side note, feel free.If you can’t figure out how to work the information into existing communications without it looking awkward, that’s because it’s awkward, and you probably shouldn’t do it.

The public only needs to know when they need to know.

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Success Generally Happens After This Part

A few weeks ago a client brought us two domain names and asked which one he should choose.

Both names were perfectly fine – one was a little more geared towards SEO keywords, and the other leaned towards being better for personal branding.

Which one to choose? What choice would give better results?

People’s first tendency – and I mean all people, not “those stupid ones who are nothing like you and me” – is to overestimate the importance of a single decision. We like to believe in the power of fate and how one specific choice determines how everything else plays out.

It’s the same thinking that makes people say “Damn, I should have invested in Apple 20 years ago.” As if that one decision would have made the rest of their lives wonderful and okay and perfect.

(They usually forget that 20 years ago, they were sitting in a dentist’s waiting room reading Wired magazine and agreeing with the “Apple is Dead” cover story. But I digress.)

When it comes to how things turn out for your ittybiz, your life, your kids, whatever, what matters most is the choices you make after you make any one particular decision.

In other words, your domain name doesn’t matter that much. 99% of your business success is going to be a result of all the decisions you make after you register it. There’s no magic in the name. There’s magic in the marketing, and the brand development, and the product offerings, and the customer service, and all the other things you do to actually build your business.

One choice can certainly affect your destiny – if you choose to start a faceless resource website as opposed to a personality brand, you’re setting yourself up for one of two very different trajectories.

But one is not more likely to be successful than the other. Trader Joe’s is a supermarket with a whole lot of personality. Publix is not. They both seem to have grown pretty well despite the difference. *

One choice can affect your destiny, but it doesn’t come remotely close to determining it.

If there’s anything we see a lot of with clients, it’s the belief that a single “correct” choice will give them enough leverage and power to cement their chances of success. Not guarantee it necessarily, but at least give them a foundation of safety.

It’s not surprising. That’s also human nature. There’s a reason the expression “Looking for Mr. Right” is an expression that everyone’s heard of. We like to believe that there is a safe decision that will make everything okay, just like magic.

That kind of magic doesn’t exist. Never has, never will. You’ll go farther if you stop believing in it.

But there is a different kind of magic. It’s a magic that happens when you get completely behind what you’re doing and hustle to make it happen. When you decide that you’re going to brave the hard parts of your business and figure it out as you go along instead of sitting around Looking for Mr. Right Marketing Decision.

The magic is in the hustle. The desire to keep going. The ability to take risks, and stay within your own values, and decide that you’re going to make this thing work.

But the operative word there is work. Not magic. The magic comes as a result of the work.

We get asked a lot about whether this business or that business is the best one to go into or whether this product or that product is the one that should come out next.

The answer, again, is it doesn’t matter that much.

What matters is what you put into your business, or your products, or your growth strategies. And that hasn’t happened yet, because that’s all going to happen next.

Apple didn’t grow because the name was catchy. It was ridiculous. It didn’t grow because Steve Jobs was magical. He got booted out of his own company decades ago. It grew because Steve and a lot of other people decided to keep hammering at it and doing the thing that needed to be done next. And next. And next. Whether things were going right, or whether they were going horribly wrong.

Your business is like that piece of workout equipment that you bought off of a commercial that one time. Was it the right choice? Should you have bought the treadmill instead?

It depends on what you choose to do with it.

Remember that next time you’re feeling stuck at a crossroads.

* Please remember that I’m a Canadian trying to use American brands, so for all I know, the CEO of Trader Joe’s has just been taken down for insider trading and the heiress to the Publix empire has been adopted by Bill Gates. They’re just examples.

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5 things to do when you feel like you’re hemorrhaging money

We get this question from clients quite a bit – generally using the exact words “It just feels like I’m hemorrhaging money, and I don’t know what to do.”

(To be completely honest, we often hear this from other people who don’t even have an ittybiz, so it’s probably safe to say that this feeling falls under “the human condition” rather than just those who decide to join the ranks of the self-employed.)

Having been in the position of hemorrhaging money myself at one time or another, I have some advice for you when you find yourself in this unenviable – but not uncommon – position.

Check to see if the language you’re using truly matches the situation you find yourself in. It might be on the money (oh, bad pun), but it might not. The average busy person says they have “no time”, when that’s generally not the case. The same goes with money.

If you’re telling yourself you’re broke and losing money hand over fist, look at how much money you do have. The number of times someone has told us they’re broke when they have three months savings in the bank or in some financial vehicle is legion. The number of times people have told us that they’re losing money left and right when what they really mean is they’re not hitting the numbers they’d hoped they’d make, equally so.

That may not be the case for you. You may be about to lose your house, or your spouse, if you don’t start bringing in the money. But the first thing you have to do is look at how you’d describe your situation if you were only allowed to use numbers and not dramatic metaphors. You might realize you have a lot more than you’re saying you do and a lot more wiggle room than you think.

That might not make your situation better, but it can get you to stop making it scarier and more intimidating than it needs to be, and hell, that’s a start.

This is very similar to point number one.

Running your ittybiz is very much like running your life. It’s more demanding than you may have ever signed up for. There will be times when it feels like you have been worn down to a raw and painful little nub and you have nothing left.

But do you have nothing left, or do you have almost nothing left?

Do you have nothing left, or do you feel like you have nothing left?

Maybe you really do have nothing left. That happens, and there’s no shame in that. A lot of very smart and successful people have let go of a business or a life situation that’s drained them down to nothing, only to rest and heal and recover and start fresh with something or someone else.

Maybe that’s you. But you need to make the distinction between truly having nothing left to give, and feeling like you have nothing left to give. Once you do, you can make peace with whatever you do next, whether it’s ending things gracefully or doubling down and giving it your all.

Everyone has their old fallback, that thought of, “If it ever gets really bad, then I’ll do X”.

X may be getting a second job. X may be getting a second mortgage. X may be selling off your furniture and going to live with your mother. We all have a worst-case-scenario plan for when things get so dramatically bad that something drastic has to be done.

And we come back to language again. If the problem you’re saying you’re having – in this case, hemorrhaging money – is truly that bad, then the time has come to do X, whatever your X is, to save your business.

If you haven’t done X, then you have to ask yourself why not. Desperate times call for desperate measures. If you’re unwilling to engage in desperate measures, either times aren’t desperate or your heart’s not in it.

(Incidentally, if your heart isn’t in it that doesn’t mean that you’re not trying hard enough. It usually means that you don’t actually want this business anymore. There’s no shame in that, either.)

But if things feel really, really bad, like the ship is sinking, and you’ve been putting off doing those things you said you’d do if the ship started sinking, then you have to ask yourself why. Or, at least, talk to someone you trust and get them to help you figure that out.

This is kind of like number 3, but a little different. Pretend you didn’t have an ittybiz in the first place. You’re just a regular person, who finds themselves hemorrhaging money because of medical bills or a lawsuit or because you lost your job six months ago and there’s not another one on the horizon.

If that happened to you, you’d probably know exactly what to do. You wouldn’t be thinking about your “business” or your “dream” or your “passion”, you’d be thinking about your cashflow, and you’d do whatever you needed to do, whether it was call a relative for a bailout or put everything you own on eBay and find the nearest couch to stay on.

But for some reason, people running their ittybiz think that financial emergency is different when you have a business than it is when you don’t. It’s still financial emergency. When things get so bad that they’re really, really bad, you don’t sit around waiting for things to get better like you would if you were just having a slump. You hustle your ass off.

Sometimes just taking your mind off your business and thinking about what you’d do about money if you didn’t have it will open up things for you.

This means “hustle.” In the vast majority of situations where a client has hit serious financial trouble, the problem boils down to being spread out too thin to get traction.

Marketing activities are taking place across the board – some frantic social media action here, a few blog posts there, some scattershot schmoozing and guest posting, et cetera.

The problem with this is the same problem you’d find yourself in Vegas if you were running out of money. Spreading your last cask between the blackjack table and the slots and the scratch tickets at the corner store isn’t going to help you recover anything. Sometimes you’ve just got to put the house on red. You’re losing anyway.

When fully executed, we’ve never seen this fail. If you pick just one marketing channel and work that with every ounce of hustle you have, you’re bound to get traction. You’re going to pay extremely close attention to your results, and you’re going to be doing it so much and so often that you’ll rapidly see what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll simply get a hell of a lot better at it.

And that might just turn things around.

If you feel like you’re hemorrhaging money, then you need to figure out why you feel that way first and what you’re going to do about it second. But as long as you let that feeling just float around as a feeling, you’re going to bleed out.

Get out of your head. Talk to someone about all five of the points above. Sell your Firefly DVDs and hire someone if you have to.

At least then you can get some peace about it.

Naomi writes more things like this in The Letter.  Get it for free today.  (It also comes with free marketing courses. You can’t move for free here.)

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