How to Build Your Startup Advertising Department
As a startup entrepreneur, you have to learn a lot on your own. You most likely don’t have any experience building a company and most likely you’ve probably never worked for a real company before, at least I can speak for those of us fresh out of college or dropouts.
So a lot of what we have to do as entrepreneurs is learn to do things ourselves. It’s common practice for me to watch someone else do a job, and then learn to do it as good or better myself. We have the confidence that we can do anything, so learning these new tasks is often fun and exciting.
Set Goals for Advertising & Exceed Them
Like anything we do at a startup, we need to set defined metrics and goals for what we do, whether it be raising capital by a certain date or learning how to conserve the most money possible, all of these are quantifiable goals and expectations that we set for ourselves and our companies.
What I’ve done for our startup as well as this blog is set a goal. The goal for this blog, while small, is to make $100 in advertising every month. This $100 can be spent re-investing in the blog to make it better and to help pay for hosting, domain, etc. costs associated with providing this blog as a service to my readers. While this $100/month is a small goal, it’s definitely something I won’t be satisfied with once I reach it. Once I know that I can make $100 a month, I don’t see why I couldn’t see myself making $200/month, $300, etc. etc. (so please take advantage of my advertising offers, if you don’t mind?)
The point is, I have a goal set for myself. I want to make $100 and I’m going to do everything I can to meet this goal. Without this goal, I have nothing to work towards. Obviously I want to make the best blog possible for my readers, but that isn’t concrete, and how do you define “best”. I could set a certain number of readers or visitors, etc. but that’s not good enough for me. At the end of the day we’re all trying to make a living and support our families, so I think an advertising goal is the best to set.
What Are Your Advertising Goals?
That being said, what is your advertising goal at your company? Are you trying to sell footer ads and looking to make $5,000 per month? Maybe you’re trying to pay for the costs of hosting your website or you’re looking to cover unlimited energy drinks or catered lunch everyday. Whatever the case may be, you need to figure out some sort of metric today. Once you have that metric, try to beat it, once you’ve beat it, you can get more and more aggressive.
The hardest and also most satisfying part about this whole process is meeting your goals and beating them. It gives you a great feeling of accomplishment and also, paying the bills is fun too.
Let us know your goals in the comments below–
