A brief history…part II

In my first brief history post I gave a very condensed history of how I originally got the idea for my business and then took the steps to implement it. A few months after starting the business I left it alone to stagnate for a year or two while I did some personal growth things like finish university, travel to Tasmania and break up with a girlfriend. When I finally came back to my business I was starting with the infrastructure in place, a few thousand dollars in savings and a desire (or lack of) to never get a full time day job. I should also point out that most of my friends where in full time day jobs just out of university and earning nice graduate salaries. My dad was very suggestive that I get a normal job first, get some experience and then maybe do my own thing. Alas, my desire to control my own timetable dictated that I didn’t want to be ANYWHERE before 9am, especially working for someone else, so I decided working on BetterEdit was worth a shot for at least the freedom of choice it allowed me regarding my working hours. Let’s not forget I totally believed in the idea as well, so I had to give it a proper shot.

The government lends a hand

One day I was driving in the car with my dad and I was talking about how I knew if I could just get the word out there my business would be successful. If I had more money for advertising I could try many different things. My dad started talking about a friend of his that was getting paid to write a book. I asked my dad if I could speak to this guy. One phone call later and I had learnt about the New Enterprise Incentives Scheme (NEIS) program. The NEIS program is a government funded scheme that pays ‘life support’ income to you every two weeks for a year while you run your business. I went to an information session, and two months later, having written a proper business plan, fronted at a panel interview and having been assigned a nice business mentor I was on the scheme for a year. I received just under $200 per week, which technically I was supposed to use to support me whilst I spent time running my business, but since I was still living at home with minimal expenses I could use the money towards marketing BetterEdit.com. If you are an Australian and you would like to learn more about the NEIS program try googling for it. If you are not an Australian I suggest you hunt around for similar business start-up grants or sponsorship programs as they can provide much needed cash and business mentoring.

The NEIS program did two things for me, it gave me a little cashflow to play with and more importantly, it psychologically confirmed that I was running my business full time and taking it seriously. I can’t stress how important that second point was for me. I now had justification to work full time towards making my business successful. I was getting paid to do it. With a new found determination I went to work to get my business off the ground.

Marketing an online business

How do you market an online proofreading and editing business? This is a tough question. I’m still not sure today how best to do this but back a few years ago I had tested only one method, putting up posters at university campuses. I knew this worked to a degree, but being a good business student I had a lot more ideas to try, and try I did!

Before I go on and tell you what I did that worked and what I tried that didn’t I should point out that everything I did was within my own means. The main factor that dictates success for a business is the entrepreneur behind the business. I chose methods of marketing that fit my personality, which I was prepared to try. Some more outgoing people may consider more outlandish publicity stunts. You can read Richard Branson’s autobiography for some good examples of ballsy things a young entrepreneur can do.

Buying ads in print magazines

Over the next twelve months I tried the following methods to advertise (this is not in sequential order by the way - it’s all a bit of a blur now):

I collected all the magazines at the newsagent that targeted writers. There weren’t many but I figured this would be a good way to reach the author/writer market all around the world. I collected all the ad rates for each magazine. Unfortunately it was just too expensive to do a traditional advertisement but a few magazines had classified sections which where under $100 to advertise in so I tested this method. One American magazine I put in for three issues, two others for one issue. The result, not one client initially, but fast forward about six months and I got one query. Not a good start.

I decided to focus only on the student market and would leave the author and business editing markets for a while.

I came across a business in Australia that specialised in advertising in campus newspapers. They acted as an agent for a bunch of the leading student produced publications at the biggest universities around Australia. I decided to spend up big on this one which was a mistake. I should have tested smaller. I can’t remember how much was spent but around $1000-$2000 to target a lot of campuses. I can’t remember getting one client from this method but my tracking referrals wasn’t as good back then. Needless to say the ROI was poor. I came to the conclusion that the people that read student papers were not my market. I don’t think international students struggling with English will pick up a campus magazine. More often these publications serve as an outlet for budding journalists and activists to have a rant about whatever issue was pissing them off at the time. Political wannabes, union members and social activists were reading these publications, certainly not my target market.

University student clubs and societies

I decided that not only was I going to target students, it was international students that really were my primary marketplace. The niche was getting smaller.

How do you reach international students? I thought international student clubs and societies, of which there are many at every university, were worth trying. You’d think it would be easy to sponsor clubs and societies at universities. They always seem to be running an event so I expected them to be eager to contact me after I tempted them with the sponsorship carrot. It wasn’t the case though. Initially I hit resistance from student unions to even just get the contact details for clubs and when I finally did locate email addresses or leave notes in pigeon holes the response was poor. It turned out that the small clubs were so disorganised that they could never get their act together to work with me and the big clubs were so professional I had to spend $500 to get even the tiniest amount of exposure.

I spent $500 in cash and prize sponsorship to sponsor a huge talent competition run by a group of Taiwanese clubs. This let me run a PowerPoint slide along with the other sponsors at the event. My slide was shown about every ten minutes for about ten seconds during the whole show on two large projectors. My banner was also listed as a sponsor of the event in the event timetable brochure. The net result: three queries and one job. Again this was very bad ROI.

During this time I also arranged to have little ads in email newsletters sent to various clubs and had flyers distributed in welcome bags during orientation week. Neither of these methods proved very fruitful.

Free publicity using press releases

This is a sample of the initiatives I tried that in my mind failed. I had more success in terms of ROI when I managed to get some free publicity in a local newspaper and in a small pocketsized Internet magazine. I was actually surprised at how easy it was to arrange and it only cost me time.

As I wrote about in my first brief history post, Geoff Cook used his story as a tool for free publicity. A young person running an Internet business from his dormroom at Harvard during the dotcom boom was something interesting and helped him get unbelievable free coverage that literally pushed the awareness of his business to a global scale. I didn’t expect that, but I could certainly leverage my age as a story.

I had recently made it to the top 100 finalist round of a fairly well known youth business plan competition called the Nescafe BigBreak. Whilst I didn’t get to the winners stage where I could compete for cash, I thought it was a good selling point and something I could use for publicity. I wrote out a small press release highlighting my age, that I was a young person starting an Internet business and that I had recently been a finalist in a national youth business competition. I tried to make it as easy as I could for a journalist to use my story and emailed off three different sized press releases and some media captures of my business logo and website. I sent it off to the editors and journalists of my local papers and Internet related magazines. Two responded positively and I got a feature article in the North West News and NetGuide magazine.

Posters have always provided the best ROI

During the time I experimented with different marketing methods I never stopped putting out posters every week. I made sure that each campus had a fresh run of posters at least every three weeks (I planned for every two but I got lazy). Most of the jobs were coming from posters or repeat clients that had either heard from a friend that had used our service or seen a poster. Since postering cost me about $0.04 a poster and a little labour and time, it was providing much better ROI than any other method I tried. Whilst walking around campuses putting up posters was becoming very tiring and I dreamed of the day I could hire someone to do it for me, it was very good for me physically too. The exercise and opportunity to get away from the computer and be outdoors was refreshing my mind. Often I came up with more ideas while walking around a campus. The exercise and ‘meditation’ of doing something repetitive and mundane was helping me be more productive and ultimately helping my business.

Today I continue to experiment with many different promotional methods and in particular have started to pick up my online marketing methods. I post in forums and newsgroups. I write press releases and work on my website copy, link exchanges and SEO. I experiment and use trial and error mixed with intuition. It’s ongoing process that will continue as long as my business exists. Even this blog is a promotional tool.

If you want to read more about my current day-to-day marketing efforts (I encourage you to learn from my mistakes) then please bookmark my blog.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager