Legend of Twitter-->

I wanted to write this article about something that recently inspired and amazed me a bit. I have a long time client, Brian Hanson, who has been a client of mine for about 10 years. About 2 months ago he approached me about his business as he noticed leads were drying up a bit and there were some serious problems with his business. I reviewed his traffic, sales, strategy and advised him accordingly. He not only followed my advice but exceeded it and has been very successful accordingly.

The Problem

Newspapers are falling apart in this country. My feeling on this is they haven’t adapted that well. They are monolithic relics of the industrial age that no longer know how to survive in the information age and most have not changed their thinking in order to adapt. Those who don’t adapt to changing circumstances become victims of it. Well, my client Brian sells classified advertising in newspapers and magazines all over the nation. You can go on his site NationWideClassifieds.com and pick a multitude of papers to run your ad in and within a few minutes you have an ad in the papers you selected. So, the paper business is falling and those wanting to place classifieds advertising is falling to.

My Advice

Basically I told him to ween himself off of this failing industry slowly and press his skills in to online marketing, which is a rapidly growing market. I told him we could rebuild his site to offer classical media advertising as well as new media marketing. We are still negotating about the revamp of his site. But in the meantime I made sure he was setup and understood Google Analytics, got him setup on twitter, made sure he was setup with a blog and showed him how to use these some of these social tools. I encouraged him on how to use twitter and blogging to promote himself and his services. He also learned on his own how to use Google Webmaster Tools to get some SEO worked in to his site.

Good Advice, But…

So, my advice is good but there are a couple problems with my advice. Brian is still selling a failing product. Classified advertising in old media is dying. Capturing a larger part of a failing market is still a faulty strategy for the long-term. I advised this as well. But Brian is a really good business man and not only followed my advice but exceeded it in a way I didn’t expect.

He was following a strategy I gave him for getting twitter followers and adapted some of his own methods on top of it. I can’t go in to detail because the strategy is a bit of a secret. So, every x amount of followers he would design a custom twitter background for his x’th number follower. I watched but thought this was strange and unexpected. His first few designs were not in my taste as a long time web developer and I said as much. But, he got much better with each free one he did. Finally he started getting requests for twitter backgrounds from paying customers who wanted better twitter background themes. Wow, he turned this damn thing in to a business.

The Lesson

Between @nationwideclass and @customtwit Brian has over 8000 followers. This is over a time span of roughly 8 weeks. He also has built customtwit.com to sell his backgrounds and is edging his way in to learning overall web design. His traffic and sales are up and his core business NationWideClassifieds is doing much better. He just landed a corporate contract to do 14 twitter backgrounds for a TV station. WTF? The lesson here? If you are clever, receptive to good advisors and are persistent you can build great things very quickly. There is no reason to sit around complaining about what’s not happening for you and/or how bad this recession is. Get up, get out and do something.