Episode #84 – Problems Or Solutions?

The post Episode #84 – Problems Or Solutions? appeared first on DotComSecrets.com Blog - Weird Marketing Experiments That Increase Traffic, Conversions and Sales.... Are you the type of person who finds problems or are you the type of person who finds answers? Find out who you are on today's exciting episode! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, everyone. This is Russell, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car”. It is currently 1:14 in the morning, and it’s funny. I volunteered at our church to lock up the building this week, and I completely forgot [laughs]. I was about to go to bed, and all of the sudden it popped into my head, so I’m driving to the church to go lock up. I thought I would jump on the phone and leave you guys all a message. Today was the first day back after being gone for two weeks, which is kind of stressful. I don’t know – our business runs well, but when you get back there’re all of these little fires that are on fire when you come back, and you’ve got to figure out how to put the fires out and what to do, and there’re so many questions. You have this stuff you want to get done. You want to move forward, but all of this reactive stuff keeps pulling you back and pulling you back. I’m sure you guys have felt that. It’s funny, because I still remember when my wife and I were engaged. I was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I was starting this business. I thought I was so cool. I had my laptop, and I was selling stuff on eBay. I had a website, and I probably had two customers total, maybe [laughs]. I might not even have been that lucky, but I remember on our honeymoon, every day I’d have to turn on my laptop and check my e-mails and make sure customer support had been handled. I didn’t want my business to collapse, and it makes me laugh so hard now. I could have not e-mailed those two customers back for that whole week, and it probably would have been a smart idea. But I digress, so I’ll come back to what I was talking about. I’m sure most of you guys who own your own business have that. You leave for a little bit, and you come back, and it’s just like you have to spend a day or two putting out all of these fires. Today for us, we specifically had a lot of stuff. I’m outside, and its 1:14 in the morning, so if I get mugged or something, we’re going to catch it live on the podcast [laughs], so all of you faithful marketers in your cars are going to be hanging out. Okay, the first door’s locked. Anyway, so basically, I came back, and our supplement has been blowing up. I’ve talked about this during the podcasts. It’s literally just going crazy. We can’t even keep up with it. Literally, if we wouldn’t have run out of inventory a little while ago [laughs], we probably would have passed a million dollars in sales this month, which is crazy. It’s just growing and growing, and it’s like a wildfire. We can’t put it down. The immediate buyers, we had to cut them down to a fourth of what they were spending, and they’re still spending like crazy. We’re trying to order new supplements and import the ingredients from all over the country. The growing season’s over, and they don’t have enough in stock of the things we need. It’s just issue after issue after issue, and problem after problem [laughs]. We’re behind on support, and we’ve got two full-time support people and they’re still so far behind, we have to hire another two or three or four more on top of that. We’re putting out ads, and we’re trying to hire people. You have people that are applying for ads. We have an ad out there that’s pretty good, that gets them to want to. In theory, it gets them to. We make them jump through a bunch of hoops and do a bunch of stuff.