Three Immutable Laws: ignore at your own risk!

Let’s face it, one of the rea­sons you’re doing what you’re doing is because you want to get paid doing some­thing you love instead hid­ing out in that cube farm all your friends migrate to five days a week.

The process of mak­ing and sell­ing your stuff is called marketing…

• you have to make some­thing for peo­ple other than your aunt Hilda;
• you want them to buy that stuff from you, in fact you want them to buy a lot of it from you and bring their friends in the process;
• you have to fig­ure out a way for them to know you have that stuff;
• you have to make it easy for them to get it.

The secret laws to mak­ing it work

So all of this fits neatly into three immutable laws:

• Peo­ple have to find you;
• They have to like you so much they want to know more and will­ing agree to see if your stuff works for them;
• They have to finally plunk their money down and com­mit to buy your stuff, prefer­ably more than once.

Before I go any fur­ther there a few things you need keep in mind always and yes you’ve heard this all before and it is easy to for­get so here it is:

• peo­ple have prob­lems every minute of the day and the only thing they care about is solv­ing their most urgent problem;
• peo­ple only buy when they have a prob­lem to solve no mat­ter how minus­cule it is;
• don’t waist your time try­ing to get every­body in the world to buy your cool stuff not every­body thinks it’s cool, spend your time on those who do;
• The num­ber one rea­son peo­ple don’t buy is trust that what­ever they are buy­ing won’t do what it is said to do or won’t solve the prob­lem in front of them right now;

If you are happy where you are then these three laws don’t mat­ter much, but if want your stuff mak­ing to be more than a hobby you’ll need to pay atten­tion to those laws.

Immutable Law #1: Be Findable

If peo­ple can’t find you and fig­ure out if what you’re mak­ing is what they are look­ing for then the like­li­hood of hav­ing to rent ever increas­ing stor­age space for your lovely stuff will def­i­nitely increase. The ugly truth is you only have so much room under your bed, in your clos­ets and in your base­ment and garage.

What do you need to do to be findable?

You have to:

• have some­thing that more than one per­son wants;
• make it so that those folks can see that you actu­ally have what they want;
• make it so you don’t waste time on try­ing to sell your stuff to folks who have no inter­est in it;

It’s about road signs

Find-ability is like road signs or points of inter­est on a map. With­out either you’ll have a hard time find­ing out if that town you’re com­ing up on has your favorite kind of food or a respectable place to lay your head. In the same way, the more find­able you are the bet­ter chance you’ll have that peo­ple look­ing for stuff like yours will see you in the crowd.

Now your strat­egy to be found will com­pletely depend on a few things not the least of which is how much you want to be found. If you’re mak­ing stuff for your garage you prob­a­bly don’t care to much about being found, how­ever, if you want to move into that new stu­dio you’ll have to start strate­gis­ing. It may sur­prise you that there is no real magic tem­plate you can apply and have an instant game plan.

Your game plan will depend on more than a few things like:

• your busi­ness model and goals, includ­ing your sale venues;
• your market’s wants and whether you have what they want;
• your posi­tion  in the minds of your market.

Remem­ber…

• peo­ple always have problems
• they only buy when when they have a prob­lem, your job is to make it easy for them to see if you might have the solu­tion to their prob­lem today.