Living With Uncertainty

Having been watching the comments in a big marketer’s Facebook Lives, I’m struck by how people are always seeking certainty before taking action. Will it work for me / my business, will it work in my niche, will it work in my country?

The limiting / negative beliefs and sweeping generalisations were coming thick and fast. This is in direct contrast to how I work, where I’ll take an idea and get the “minimal viable version” up and running and just test, test, test!

I’m actually testing using Facebook Live to record the middle part of my vzine each week now, so that I can test Social Media Examiner’s assertions that Facebook Lives are a waste of time after the event, while Frank Kern says the exact opposite.

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

Mentioned In The Vzine

On the blog

Split Testing Prices
How Is 2019 Looking?
A Video A Day (Results)
Growing Your Nest Egg
Self Awareness
Cleaning Up Linked In
Financial Peace Of Mind
Own It! 209 | 2019: Planning for a New Year
Own It! 208 | Thoughts On Friendship
Vzine 83 | Self Awareness
Vzine 82 | New Year’s Resolutions. Too Little Too Late?

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Hello, and welcome to the Vzine this week. I’m going live on Facebook. I’m taking a leaf out of Frank Kern’s book, and I’m going live. In the middle section of the Vzine this week is me going live, talking about entrepreneurial uncertainty because so many people seem to be seeking entrepreneurial certainty and there just isn’t any such thing.

So I cover the main points about what I see people needing and how to deal with entrepreneurial uncertainty and I hope you enjoy it.

I’m still in Shoreham, I’m staying with the kids an extra couple of weeks, just because I can, and I’m heading back on Friday to Stoupa in The Mani.

I give you a tip in the middle section this week about someone who is a natural-born marketer. And if you’re interested in Greece, then you can follow her and she goes live on a regular basis and shows you the most beautiful parts of where we live.

Let’s get on with the show, shall we?

The whole topic of today’s conversation, for the first five minutes anyway, is, living with uncertainty as an entrepreneur. Because I was just watching one of Frank Kern’s live videos and he’s been doing a lot recently and I was reading the comments, and one of the things I was noticing was people were seeking assurance.

They were seeking assurance that things would work for them, that things would work in their market niche, that things would work in their geolocation, and they just really wanted to know that things would work.

So they were looking for assurances that it would work in the real estate market, they were looking for assurances that social media marketing would work in the car sales market, and they were looking for assurances that it would work in the bug catching arena.

I know Hal the Bug Catcher, from down there in Florida, and he has done great with video marketing. I don’t believe there’s a business that could not do well with video marketing and social media marketing.

There was one guy on Frank’s timeline that was asking about a banqueting hall. He’d got the job of trying to market a banqueting hall. Well, I’d be going live from every single event that that banqueting hall is hosting. I’d be going down there as a marketing person, I’d be making sure I was taking fabulous video live from the events. Or I’d be getting fabulous photos of the events and I would be turning those photos into a video using a tool like Lumen5 for example, and then I would be putting some fabulous music on top of that, and then I’d be rolling that out on my Facebook page.

I think there is ways now using, what is it, OPS? Open Broad– OBS, Open Broadcasting System, that will actually let you run a video in the middle of your live as if it was part of the live itself. You can do these things, they are perfectly doable.

So stop looking for assurances that this will work in your market or that this will work in your country and just get on and try it. You don’t know until you try. There might be a niche market business out there that this doesn’t work for, but you’ll never know until you try, because nobody else is going to try it for you.

Now, what else do I want to say on this? Oh yeah, my daughter has had two business ideas this week. She’s actually looking for a digital marketing job in the Brighton area.

So she’s got editing and filming skills, and we’ve been doing lots of job applications for her this week. The funny thing is that there are lots of digital marketing jobs out there, I was really surprised at that in January.

Entrepreneurial uncertainty. Anyway, she had two business ideas. I think that the thought of getting a job was prompting the old grey matter to come up with reasons why she didn’t need to.

The first thing she came up with was a big e-commerce idea and I knew that she wouldn’t be able to test that idea easily. Because that’s the idea, when you get a new business idea, is to be able to test the viability of that idea as quickly and inexpensively as possible. You need to get your offer in front of enough eyeballs to tell if you’ve got a “goer” as we call it.

The first idea that she had would have taken massive amounts of e-commerce software writing to test it, so we sat and thought about it for a little while, and we thought, what, essentially, would the idea have delivered to the customers that she was thinking of?

And we managed to come up with an idea that was more of a concierge shopping service online in a particular niche. We thought, okay, so what do we need to test that? All we need is a little website and some traffic from the right niche market.

That is exactly what I did with my new idea, WritingClubWorld.com, for writers who want to get critiqued by their peers. I got a little bit of software written, just the bare minimum, the minimum viable product, and I got it done before Christmas. I put the minimum viable website up and I started driving traffic to it.

People are signing up, they’re uploading their stories, and they’re getting reviewed by their peers. And it’s working, people are interested. People are coming from all over the world and I found literally within hours of putting the site live, and putting the search engine tags on it, I was getting traffic from Bing already, and now we’ve been indexed by Google, too.

So testing your business ideas can be really quick, but you’ve got to be willing to live with the uncertainty that the idea might be a dud. You’ve got to be willing to try it. You’ve got to be willing to invest some time and perhaps a bit of money. I invested about $300 in getting my software done to the minimum viable place, because I didn’t know if it was going to work or not.

Nobody can know if anything’s going to work or not. You have to just try it.

Certain things work in certain markets. Certain things work in others.

What’s on the blog and the podcast this week?

It’s been a busy week this week, because we’re back. The podcast is back. Episode 209 of OwnItthePodcast.com is up on my blog already and if you go to NicolaCairncross.com/blog you can see that, or indeed, you can go to OwnItthePodcast.com and we’re talking about 2019, because Judith and I have a very different style, as you may have noticed if you’ve listened to the podcast at all.

We are tackling our reviews of 2018 and how we’re looking forward to 2019. What we’re going to do, what we want to achieve, what our goals are and we’re tackling them in two very different ways. Exactly what you’d imagine.

On the blog this week, we’ve got various one-minute videos. I’m quite obsessed with pricing this week. So I’ve got a video on how to split-test your prices, how’s 2019 looking, why I’m creating a video a day, and what the results have been from doing that, they’re quite astonishing!

I also cover how to grow your nest egg, something I’ve learned this year that I never thought I’d be able to do. How I took a tiny little pot of money and I’m managing to grow it every day. Some days I’m not losing any money, but there are other days I’m making money and the nest egg is growing like a little snowball, which is really very exciting. So, go and check out that video on the blog, NicolaCairncross.com/Blog

On the Podcast, the Vzine’s always going on, Let me just see what was on the Vzine last week… Ah! Self awareness, that’s what I talked about last week. Episode 83 of the Vzine, which goes out on YouTube, you can subscribe on YouTube if you want to just get that. It also goes out on iTunes as an audio podcast. So do go and check out the Clicks And Leads podcast on iTunes, or go along and have a look for the Internet Marketing Vzine on YouTube.

Talking about self awareness, talking about the tests I’ve been putting Phoebe through to find out what her core needs are, her core values, what her personality type is, her fastest route to the money, and also what’s her preferred method of taking action.

If you want to know a lot more about yourself and a lot more about how you can be very happy in your work and enjoy what you do, while simultaneously making more money, go and check out Vzine 83 on NicolaCairncross.com/Blog. Speak to you next week!

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
Chill & Relaxing Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Instrumental – Warm Nights // No Copyright Music
[No Copyright Music] Chill Lofi Hip Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music – Watching The Clouds

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

Drone Footage of Shoreham by Sea
Scott Wright Photography

Check out more videos on my YouTube channel