Short answer is no, although having a great coach gets you touchdowns, right? Well to an extent it does. You, my friend, have developed special skills and now all eyes are on you. You were scouted and offered a lot of money to become a part of a team. Meaning you get good at what you love and the more you do it, the better you become and rewards come to you.
Ok, now lets try doing it with a marketing guru. First thing the guru ask is to give them money. I don't care if its a membership to a site they have put together or a link where to send them money. Most of these gurus don't have a proven track record of businesses they've owned and been successful. Too many scams and self proclaimed geniuses.
Do you need a website for an upcoming business to be successful? Absolutely NOT!
Do you need SEO's and to learn about them? NO!!!
Do you need twitter, Facebook, G+ or any social media? NO NO NO.
It's all useless if you haven't put together a business plan and know the audience you are targeting. It doesn't matter if you have 1 million followers in any given social site if no one is interested in your product. Even worse, if your million followers are trying to sell you something similar to what you are intending to sell.
For example, I'm an author of a book and I want to sell copies, am I going to target people who like to read books? Or would I target other authors? So why would I want a timeline full of other authors trying to sell their books if they would never buy mine. We all want to make money but this is about you having a successful business, so its become all about you. Don't get me wrong, I support other authors that support me.
Sitting in front of a computer will not build a successful business. You need to get out into the real world and make it happen. No one is going to work as hard as you would for your own business. Once you have developed accounts and the business starts taking off is when you start targeting for people in social media.
Why this approach? Because building real followers is tedious and takes time. We go out and start learning to make sites and accounts losing focus on the main objective building a real business. If you have a product and build a website,but no one knows you exist, who is going to visit it. Don't fall for the SEO lies. Get out and do face to face. Go to small businesses and ask them if the would stock your product. Meet liked minded people that love to help and share advice without having their hand out asking for money.
The truth is that technology has a lot of great tools to offer. You just need to know when is the proper time to implement them. I personally know thousands of successful business owners that don't even own one site. Spending a month or two to build one or learning how-to, will put your real intentions to the side. I'd rather give out a business card that has only my name and number, than a thousand social sites. I'd rather they look at my card and call me than retweeting my product or liking one of my posts.
When it becomes more important to have followers, than selling your product, you can just hang it up. Last time I checked, I can only deposit money in my business accounts, not likes, retweets or +1's.
AC Cruz
