Go Smart or Go Home

I was out shopping a few days ago. When I returned to the car I found a pamphlet stuck under the windscreen wiper. I looked around and saw that just about every car had one of these pamphlets. So I pulled it out and looked at it (as you do) and found it was advertising for a work from home business.

It had the usual – Tired of working 9 – 5?
Sick of cubicles?
Over peak hour traffic?
Want to fire your boss?

This work-from-home pamphlet also had the usual pictures – nice big mansion, flash car and a grate view of the beach.
Then a wesite  address and a 1800 number.

This person (I don’t know their name – thats one thing they didn’t have on the pamphlet!) had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble. They had to design the pamphlet – work out what to write on it, find the right pictures, then print them out (or print one and then photocopy the hell out of it) and deliver them.

There were maybe 150 cars in this carpark. Most that I could see had pamphlets on them. There is 6 carparks at this particular shopping centre. I didn’t bother driving around to see if those cars had pamphlets as well, it probably depended on how many copies they had made.

When I got home, after I put the groceries away, had a coffee and relaxed a bit (shopping can be verrrry tiring lol) I decided to have a look at this website. I wasn’t interested, I got my own business to look after, but I was curious.

It was just a generic squeezepage, the same as thousands of others out there, just encoded with this persons affiliate code or id, and no information about what this home business was, or did.

This person has obviously put a lot of time and effort into this form of advertising. Unfortunately it was probably totally wasted!!!

How many of those people shopping at that particular time would be interested in their own home business. More than likely – NIL.
All that time, effort and money gone to advertise to people who have absolutely No interest in what you have to offer.

There is an old saying – Work Smart, Not Hard. This was a prime example of someone working very hard.

I wonder how many sign-ups they got from this – they would be damn lucky to have gotten one. All those hours of work for no reward

I did call the number on the pamphlet, a 1800 number, just to let them know there was an easier way to do things, but all I got was a recorded message, refering me back to the website and to leve my name and number in the opt-in box. Needless to say, I didn’t.

If you do advertise, and if you are running your own business, working from home at some point you will have to, advertise somewhere where there are people actively looking for what you have to offer.

Don’t try to trick people to your website, don’t try to fool people iinto signing up.You will just end up fooling yourself. You will end up with a lot of traffic and no commissions, and you’ll wonder why.

Work Smart not hard – Find out where people who would be interested in what you are offering hang out – and promote it there.
Forums, groups, facebook – you may end up with a lot less traffic, but what you do get are people who are already interested in what you have, you don’t have to convince anyone, their hand is already on their wallet. And you didn’t have to walk around delivering a thousand pamphlets or more.

If you are not workng smart, then you might as well go home – you are completely wasting your time and money!

Click this link to find out one way of working smart.

It could be the smartest move you make.