Online Marketing Mindshift sample

If you’ve ever been frustrated by our online marketing efforts, you may enjoy my fifth book we’ve just released, Online Marketing Mindshift. It is designed to help people—especially people at non-profits or small businesses who are wearing several hats—make the best use of their time and energy when they do online marketing for their organization.

While you can find an excerpt of Online Marketing Mindshift on Amazon, and a longer excerpt on the book’s official website, I wanted to provide an exclusive excerpt here for you. Then you can decide if you feel like this book will be helpful for your online marketing purposes.

Before you get to the excerpt, I’d like to take a moment to give a big thank you to Holly, who designed an excellent cover for this book! Her design talents were so instrumental to the production of this book that I might have forgotten to thank her at the very end…

Mindshift Concept 4

 

The Point of Optimization

Have you ever heard an expert in a specific online marketing platform speak on that platform? It’s amazing how they tell you that your number one priority should be spending more time with that platform. You end up guilted into using it more, and probably burn out eventually.

Or maybe you’ve seen others in your industry spend tons of time on a specific platform, and get tons of benefit from it. You would love the same benefit, but there’s no way you have that kind of time! So you don’t use it at all.

It doesn’t matter which of those is your issue. In both cases, the platform does you no good!

So what leads to those two problems? Is there any way to avoid them?

The key lies in understanding your Point of Optimization.

Return on Time Invested

If you enjoy math, you may enjoy this exercise. If not, bear with me for a moment and all will be made clear. If you have a piece of paper and writing utensil, feel free to actually use them. If not, your imagination is an acceptable substitute. Or you can check out the final product at ommbook.com/graph

First, draw a blank graph, with an X axis along the bottom and a Y axis along the left. Don’t worry, I’ll share in a moment what each axis represents.

Starting where the X and Y axes meet, draw a curved line. It should move up and to the right, then quickly begin to level off while continuing to the right. Finally, draw a dot where it begins leveling off.

Now imagine you’re in a classroom full of people all drawing this graph. You look to your left and then to your right. While your graph is close to your neighbors’ graphs, it doesn’t match exactly. And the dot is definitely in a different spot.

I’ve run hundreds of people through that exercise, and have yet to find any two people whose graphs match exactly. While there have been a handful of times the lines were close, the dots were never in the exact same spot.

The Y axis is Return, and the X axis is Time Invested. The curve you’ve drawn — or imagined drawing — represents your Return on Time Invested. And the dot I’ve described is your Point of Optimization. In other words, it’s the point at which you maximize your Return on Time Invested.

What does that mean for online marketing? While you could spend more time on any individual online marketing platform, it may not be worth it.

The Point of Optimization is different for every industry. It’s different for every organization within an industry. It’s different for every individual within an organization. And it’s different for every platform one individual uses.

Just because another organization in your industry gets a lot of mileage out of a given platform doesn’t mean you will. And if you’re new to your job, just because your predecessor made use of a platform for your organization doesn’t mean you’ll get the same mileage out of it.

There are four elements that factor into your Point of Optimization…

Once you finish the book, you can use this tool to hold you accountable for the action items you set for yourself. You can find out more about the book on the Online Marketing Mindshift website, and you can find it on Amazon as well, both in print and Kindle versions.

And whether you enjoy it or not, we’d love a review on Amazon!