Journey To No More Clients

Hello, long time lurker here. I've been on a journey for a while, but it's started to get interesting. This is as much a diary for my own sake as to share with BHW.

In January 2005 I wrote on my whiteboard that I wouldn't work anymore for an employer. In March 2006 I got married, left my last place of employment, and started freelance web development. I eventually grew that to a staff of about 10 employees, various combinations of local/offshore/contract/full-time employees. Given this is a marketing journey and forum, I should note that most of the work came through word of mouth. The extent of my marketing efforts were networking with fellow nerds at the pub, and branded Christmas cards. I had my first (of two) children in 2012 and decided to wind down the business. Mostly I didn't like the direction that sort of business had to go to scale properly. Also the trade off to pursue that path instead of being with my young family was not appealing. I returned to a simple freelance arrangement to reclaim my head space, and regroup.

In January 2013 I wrote on my whiteboard that I wouldn't work for any more clients. It's nothing against my clients, it's more that I have other things I want to do with my life. Since that time, I have allowed my client base to naturally atrophy. This has gradually left me with more time to my own projects, and more importantly my own thoughts. About September 2015 the stars aligned and I found a project that I felt I could commit significant effort toward. I had a strong interest in the niche, a vision for the business, and an existing market with what I believe is a gap in the market. Unfortunately I let my clients atrophy a little far and I'm now trying to tread financial water by finding a couple stop gap clients. Not a problem, but a pain.

Last week I pushed my product live. It's at a point where all the basics are in place - product version 1.0, single landing page, payment processing, trial/demo setup. This was a good moment, but felt very much like things were just getting started.

Now I'm trying to drive traffic to the site. There is a single landing page, no optimisation yet. I've setup campaigns with Adwords and Bing and traffic is trickling in. I've connected Google Analytics with Adwords and Bing, along with my shopping cart. It's very early days, so right now I feel like I'm just gathering information. On paper, I've segmented my keywords and defined a vague strategy for various landing pages but yet to implement. I also want to look at the Google content network but not there yet.

I'm giving FollowLiker a go with Instagram and Twitter accounts. The FL accounts are not directly tied to my product, but I'm hoping they will perform personal targeted shoutouts etc. A bit like a social media PBN I suppose. I'm producing real content by grabbing free pics, pushing them through Photoshop to look way more interesting, and then pushing out to those networks. I'm slow playing this one with very safe FL configuration, one proxy per account, and real phone numbers. I figure it's worth a shot with the low time input given the turn key content creation and the FL automation.

I'm pushing my users through to my mailing list. Visitors have to register for the product demo, and this puts them on the mailing list. High on my priority list is to setup auto-responders for the various types of visitors that I want on my site. I'm working to segment my advertising by motivation and then translating this in to keyword groups, landing page, and auto-responder funnels.

Anyway, that gets the journey up to date. I hope I can share progress with you in the days to come.

Good luck!

This journey looks like it'll have tons of information I'll be needing in a few months. Hope you succeed!

An update:

• I limited geo on Adwords and Bing to a handful of the major English speaking populations. The Indian click throughs were dominating and not a match for my offer. As an aside, I reckon they were Indian copywriters looking for info. Problem now is that volume has dropped off and Ads aren't running. Next point addresses this.
• On paper I've split my generic marketing funnel in to a few more specific funnels. So right now I have 780 keywords in a single adgroup - which I know is rubbish. I just wanted something to work with. Now I'm trying to be more patient and specific with my sales funnels. E.g. instead of CPC of "buy this now" then landing on a product page, it's more like CPC of "here's some info" and then landing on a bridge page that introduce the problem and offers my product as the solution. This feels like a better fit for the market, but there's quite a bit of work involved.
• Started a Reddit paid campaign to find testers. I give them free access and they give me feedback. My hope is that I will be able to solicit testimonials and/or learn more about my potential customers. This has got me a bit down to be honest. I'm literally giving away my product for free and I've only had a single signup after 50 click throughs. Also, the Reddit approval system is slow... damn slow. I'm trying to shift my live ad to a new subreddit but I'm sitting in the approval queue for hours.
• Ordered a long expiry SIM card to setup a second set of FL accounts.

Good luck mate !

We want to see some numbers soon.

You have truly been on a journey. I just got motivated going through your post. One thing I can note is that you have stayed on the course. I tell you there are very many times when you feel like you should quite and am glad that they never shaken you. All I can say for now is that you need to stay focused that way and stick to the plan you have. I am so sure you will go far and start seeing the fruits.

• Reddit resumed my ad during US day time and managed to pick up a handful of free tester signups. It took approx 18 hours for Reddit to approve my ad. While I waited I updated my landing page copy to be a bit friendlier and more specific. Chart attached fwiw.
• For the first week I used FL to post 8 quality posts to IG and Twitter. Now I've started with the follow/unfollow bot and my numbers are Twitter 11 followers, IG 14 followers after a day. I have very safe/slow settings configured. I have more posts nearly ready to queue. I'm pretty confident that the content will hold it's own and help make the process look less spammy.
• Today hope to have copy completed for a single landing page targeting a specific motivation. I have an idea on how I need to reconfigure my offer which I want to implement. So instead of a generic "try the product demo", it's more specific to the need "solve your problem for 3 days". This marketing stuff is still really new to me but getting the gist I think. Requires more empathy than I naturally posses

@vladimir22 There's some tiny numbers for you Hopefully they get bigger.

@SEMWORLD Thanks mate. I'm too stubborn to quit.