Hi – Ian here.

The trouble with a lot of marketing advice is it's context-free.

“This one simple website tweak will double your sales” for example.

“Ooh” you think. I'll try that.

Especially if you're the kind of person who likes tweaking your website in preference to, say, talking to people. (mea culpa, obvs).

The problem is that if your website is getting no visitors, or if you already have something similar to that tweak, or if the tweak just doesn't click for your audience…you're not going to get anywhere near the same results.

About a decade ago I did my first (and only) big online launch.

I copied the type of videos one of the big gurus at the time had used for a big 7-figure launch he was talking about.

I had all the clever launch sequence stuff going on with different emails depending on how people interacted.

It took me an age and a ton of effort to set up.

And while they were OK, the results weren't anywhere near what the guru got.

I was kinda satisfied, but in all honesty a bit disappointed that it hadn't been a big breakthrough for me. I wondered what I'd done wrong that meant I didn't get the kind of results the guru talked about.

A few weeks later he did a handful of postmortem videos of his campaign (as a lead up to selling a course on it, of course).

By piecing 2 + 2 together from a couple of different videos I managed to figure out what his list size and conversion rates had actually been – rather than just the headline revenue figure.

And it turns out I'd had a significantly higher conversion rate of email subscribers into paying customers than him.

There'd been nothing wrong with my videos and emails and automations.

The issue was that his email list was over 50x as big as mine.

What I'd done was copy a marketing technique primarily designed to increase conversion rates. But I just didn't have enough people to convert to properly justify the big fixed investment in all the videos and automations.

Of course, the way the guru talked about the method made it sound like it would work for everyone. But a bit of common sense should have told me otherwise.

A couple of simple questions would have helped me:

Look behind the big claims and ask “what is this marketing technique or strategy primarily designed to do?” (e.g. get you more contacts, build relationships, build credibility, convert contacts into customers, etc).

Think of your own business and ask “is that something that's a problem for me? Would an improvement in that area make a big difference to my results?”

Unless you can give a very big yes to that combination of questions you should pass.

No matter how great the results the method supposedly gets for everyone else.

There are subtleties to this of course.

And there's an important difference in the economics of marketing at a small scale and large scale which it's worth knowing.

I'll talk about that in my next email.