"Gold rushes are interesting things. They’re short, sharp and a few people make a huge amount of money. They’re also followed by years of people turning up at the mine hoping to find some gold – and being disappointed.
Gold rushes occur in business – but sadly, they’re rare.
I’ve only known two business gold rushes in all the years I’ve been doing this……
The first began almost 10 years ago. It was Google Adwords. For 3 – 4 years, pay per click advertising was the Entrepreneur’s gold rush. All you had to do was turn up at the Google mine and it was a license to print a lot of money. You could bring customers into your business for next to nothing – and Google didn’t care how you did it.
To be fair, Adwords is still a source of significant profits for most smart Entrepreneurs. It’s just not a gold rush any more. Prices have gone up. There are lots of restrictions in place. You can turn up at the mine but you have to wear a suit and the gold has turned to silver. Still worth doing, but those who missed the boat, missed out big time. Those were the days……..
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a second gold rush like that to come along. But it’s here. The current gold rush is Facebook Advertising. It lets you reach your perfect customer nationally or locally but – and here’s the goldrush bit – it lets you do it unbelievably cheaply.
It’s cheap because the mass of advertisers either don’t know about it or understand it. Meanwhile, Facebook has space for several ads on every single page it shows. That’s hundreds of millions of pages. 95% of business owners don’t know it’s there or are daunted at the prospect of trying it out, so it’s cheap, cheap, cheap. But it’s cheap advertising that you can choose to only have shown to your best potential customers:
My prediction is this gold rush will last 1 – 2 years. It is there for the taking for every type of business. You don’t have to like Facebook to do it (I don’t like and rarely use Facebook.) You just have to like making money.
I’ve yet to find a business that shouldn’t be testing Facebook Advertising. In a world where running your own business is tough, every now and then the universe throws us something easy, straightforward and profitable. When that happens, great Entrepreneurs grab it."
Original message from Chris Cardell, leading UK Marketing Guru.
