I’m observing someone who has made amazing progress in the last year in achieving leadership success as an expert in marketing for the engineering community. This success causes me to feel a mixture of envy and respect but also makes me much more aware of some of the essential elements of success for anyone in developing new business.
To start, go to Matt Handal’s Help Everybody Everyday blog. When I visited there earlier today, I cringed slightly. The links to my blog (and some others I respected) had been removed — but one to a site that I consider my “search engine competitor” remained in place. This might seem to be something that would cause me just a little pain and anxiety (it did), but equally, it allowed me to focus on the content of his own blog and to realize that he is finding his own expression.
This also is apparent in his success with his SMPS White Paper application this year. We both applied last year. Mine failed, as did his. Last year, he sought to apply jointly with another marketer but lost out on what should have been an excellent presentation because, it turns out, the other presenter had applied to speak about his his own project. This year, Matt decided on a singular focus and made sure he would be presenting on just the topic where he could be a true authority. He succeeded.
Of course, a little persistence helped. But persistence without some intelligent learning takes you down a much less positive road. In another space entirely, a website developer in India has been trying again and again, to earn advertising revenue through Google’s pay-per-click program. His site doesn’t qualify, so once the Google bots discover the problem, they disable his ad-serving service. The rules say you can only have one account, ever. This doesn’t stop him. Last week, he went over the line and communicated with me privately asking for me to help him “in confidence”. My response: I reported him as an Internet stalker.
Putting these two thoughts together, I think you can appreciate how persistence can be a two-edged sword in successful business — and construction marketing. If you don’t carry on, if you don’t keep trying, you will never reach the point where you can comfortably find your own voice. But if you just keep on repeating the same old mistakes over and over again, you will travel on an endless treadmill of failure.
i encourage you to read the helpful articles and resources you find here and in other media, to listen to consultants, idea-generators and and other services. Then, frankly, you need to get started at what you really want to accomplish. Expect failure at the start. Then learn some more. Then grow. Then watch for complacency and (again) failure. You can give up, then, or learn and resume your growth. Find your own voice but if it doesn’t work, make the changes you need to make before trying again.
(And, yes, I hope Matt will extend the same courtesy to my search engine competitor as he has to me.)
Matt has communicated with me to say that he removed my blog reference and some others because the feed set up he was using were slowing down his website — he didn’t intend it as a slight.
This of course proves the point that it is dangerous to make assumptions and it is almost always wise to check and verify things (but it is still temptingly easy to jump to conclusions!)