For those of you following my domestic dramas from midweek, I thought I ought to let you know that the wifi is fixed and the microphone's been replaced. The sink, on the other hand, is a long, long story best saved for another day.

In Thursday's email I talked about how it's almost always better to do some marketing today – even if far from perfect – than it is to wait and wait while to try to achieve perfection.

My point was that marketing is never a one-shot thing. You can market today, tomorrow, next week, the week after. You don't have to avoid marketing today to do something better tomorrow. You can market today AND do something better tomorrow.

But there's another important thing going on that Thursday's email brought home to me.

Because I got more replies in the first few minutes of sending Thursday's hurriedly-written email than I think I've had for years. Something I genuinely wasn't expecting.

It reminded me very starkly that you never know what's going to hit and what's going to miss with your marketing. You have to try it out and see.

Sure, past experience helps a lot. As does listening to people like me who've made every mistake under the sun so we can tell you how to avoid them (and maybe share some good practices too).

But while accumulated expertise can point you in the right direction and avoid common pitfalls, ultimately you and your clients are unique. 

What works for me might work for you, or it might not.

What worked for you before might work again. Or it might not.

The only way to find out is to try it.

Whether that's sending an email, making a presentation or webinar, launching a new product, offering someone your services.

The more things you try and the faster you try them, the sooner you find out what works and what doesn't. And the sooner you can react to feedback and improve things.

I think it's a fundamental character trait of many of us who want to do great work for clients that we only want to put our best stuff out there.

And that leads us into this cycle of spending ages locked away trying to perfect things before letting them loose in the world.

But I think we have to accept that we simply can't do great work without feedback. The act of letting things loose and letting people see them is what makes them great. Because it's where feedback comes from.

You may have heard me tell the story of when I used to watch magic competitions and noticed that performers who did quite badly one year were often the best the next, whereas the performers who did well didn't necessarily improve so much.

The reason was that the “bad” performers weren't afraid to go out and perform and get real-world feedback even when they knew it might be harsh. Over the year they were getting 10x the input as the guys who just practised in front of a mirror again and again.

With marketing, you've got to be more like the “bad” magicians who try stuff out quickly, get feedback and improve rather than the guys who try to perfect things before ever showing them to real people.

It's not quite “fail fast”. It's more “do OK fast”, then do better and better and better.