How to Increase Your Business’s Luck in 2015
TL;DR: “Lucky” business owners aren’t lucky at all; they’re prepared. Taking the right opportunities now means your business can hit it big when the time is right.
Do you feel like your business can’t catch a break?
…Like you spend hundreds (or thousands) on advertising trying to build an audience, but never seem to gain traction?
…Like you’ve got a great product, but no one “gets” it yet, so you aren’t making sales?
…Like you’d have customers flocking at your doors if only they understood how much your wares could change their lives?
If so…
…Sounds like you’re not unlucky at all.
I’m of the firm belief luck is 2% chance and 98% preparation. By setting yourself up to take advantage of great opportunities when they come, you’ll be “luckier” simply because you’ll be ready for great things to happen.
Here’s a great quote from Richard Wiseman’s 10-year study, The Luck Factor:
Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
And another from Seneca:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Since it’s Friday the 13th, I thought it’s a great time to share some of the ways I’ve helped my clients be “lucky.”
Here’s an example of my “luck”: I convinced one of my early clients to invest in content marketing right before it got mainstream in 2011. This led to millions of dollars in sales for that client, revitalizing his business and giving him the capital to expand into new opportunities.
Some said I was lucky for betting so big on email and blogging. “Email was dead,” they said. “You got lucky because you used it right when it was making a comeback.”
Nope. Nuh-uh. Not at all.
It wasn’t luck at all. I actually knew email/content was the right channel because I knew my industry back and forth.
Your business can be similarly “lucky,” too… if you follow these tips.
How to Make Your Business Luckier in 2015
These simple things will set your business up for success this year.
- Always have multiple irons in the fire. If you’re banking everything on a single project, you’re playing a dangerous game. Market changes happen without warning much of the time. Lucky businesses have a few projects they’re building at any given time.
- Respect your audience. If you treat your customers like cattle, they won’t be loyal to you. (Well, a few probably will, but this is bad. The loyal few often lead bad business owners into assuming all of their customers are loyal, and that sets them up for failure.) Being good to your customers, other business owners, and generally anyone you come in contact with leads to positive returns.
- Know what’s coming next. I spend hours every day reading about the latest digital marketing trends because I need to know. I need to know, for my clients’ sakes, what’s coming. If I don’t know how the market has changed, I can’t make good predictions about how it will change in the future. And that means I can’t deliver great digital marketing strategy plans.
Of course, you may not have hours per day to learn your industry. That’s fine. That’s actually why I created the TL;DR Digital Marketing Report (available soon). If you want to know what you missed, and what’s coming, you’ll want to subscribe.
