I get very impatient with the Mindset section of most marketing infoproducts. I don’t find it very effective to sit around and puzzle out My Big Why, or whatever, or fantasize about My Ideal Workday. I haven’t had a job with a set schedule in about ten years at the time of this writing. I wake up without an alarm clock most days, set my own schedule. I’m still worried about money all the time. I still vacillate between fully committing to either my Design and Marketing agency or my Illustration shop, and consequently don’t spend enough time on the support/ long-term planning work of either of them.
In general, all the educational content about marketing you find for sale online is about the same. I don’t know if there is some master playbook, or if it’s just that there are enough of us out there trying and experimenting that the science is really solid. Marketing is marketing— once you’ve got down the gist of how to do it, you just need to do it — there isn’t one more secret technique, no One Weird Trick to Skyrocket Your Sales that will unlock the easy road to getting your product or service in front of the eyeballs of people who want to buy it.
You just have to try stuff and keep trying stuff until something works, and once you find something that works, scale it and keep an eye on your metrics. Keep trying other stuff in the meantime so that you’re a little ahead when the tide changes.
That’s it. That’s the whole science of marketing.
My problem is that occasionally, I’ll get antsy. I’ll want things to work faster, my numbers will dip and I’ll succumb to panic, and then I start buying educational products that are below the level I want to be working at, because I’ll get seduced by their One Weird Trick nonsense. I can’t continue to let myself sit in the liminal space between choosing the agency, and choosing the shop if I want to make any progress on either. It just takes too much of my time and gets me nowhere, even though it feels like I’m being thorough and meticulous. Decide, move forward.
I have severe anxiety; I refer to the inside of my mind as the Terror Dome (thank you, Parks and Rec), no wonder I was never able to relate to ideas of mindset. But I realized that I can replace that stage in the process with grown-up business words like Determining KPIs1, and performing a SWOT analysis2, and that gets me to the same place in the process of setting up an executable game plan for my businesses. So this is where I landed:
I can and will let one support the other. Spending time working through the challenge of making the shop work will create really solid educational content for the agency. Focus on creating a repeatable system that others can benefit from. Document it here.
This is focusing my offerings for Sharptooth Creative down to less of a traditional agency model, and more of Done-With-You marketing stack that mirrors what I’m doing at Sharptooth Snail. I’m already a Shopify Partner and have a bunch of affiliate relationships with the services that make the shop run. Sharptooth Snail has always been the proving ground for The Stack, before I was ever offering The Stack as a product. This is going to require that I get really vulnerable about what has and hasn’t worked with Sharptooth Snail, and that’s scary.
I’ve taught a workshop called Make It Real twice now, on the premise that Print On Demand is a viable business model for artists who want to earn some money from their art. And while I have done that— it is absolutely true that when I’m paying attention to it my shop has generated over $1000 in sales revenue in a month. But that “when I’m paying attention to it” clause is more vague than I want to be. That means publicly3 facing the revenue vs profit issue.
For Print on Demand, a profit margin of around 20-30% is a reasonable expectation, meaning those $1000 months are only really earning me about $2-300. We have to scale, or we die.