Market segmentation has had a strong effect on my professional and academic career. Let me tell you what it has done for me.

I Started In The Wrong Career

I started my career teaching English at a small private college. I hated it and barely made a subsistence income. I became determined to use my skills doing something that I liked and that rewarded me financially.

I Made a Lateral Career Change

When I got the opportunity to start a marketing and public relations program for a small community college, I jumped for it. Now when I say small, I mean small. This college looked like a couple of buildings in the middle of a cow pasture, and it had only a few hundred students.

Now at this point in my career, I’d never heard of market segmentation. But in four years of teaching college students, I’d learned how they thought, what they wanted and how they wanted to get it. Plus, still in my twenties, I wasn’t much older than the students, and the college was just 45 miles from where I grew up so I knew their culture. In short I knew this market.

I developed ads and promotions designed specifically for potential students in that and surrounding towns and delivered those messages through the media they used. My efforts resulted in doubling enrollment and my salary in each of the four years that I worked at the college.

I Learned The Importance Of Knowing My Target Market

That success convinced me of the importance of knowing a market. I still didn’t know the term market segmentation, but I understood the importance of knowing a target market. I also understood the influence of age and background on behavior.

Because I never lucked into another market so much like me, I had to determine ways of learning about other markets. That led to better jobs and greater success until I decided that I wanted to teach young people the career that I had found so rewarding.

I Developed A System To Help My Students

By this time, I did know the term “market segmentation” and I knew the fundamentals of doing basic market segmentation research.

But my students found learning about target markets more challenging, so I developed a systematic process to teach them how, and it worked. They began basing verbal and visual communication decisions on target market characteristics, winning awards for their work, getting the best jobs in the area and competitive jobs nationwide.

And people in the profession began to notice, leading to speaking opportunities for me locally and nationally, my first book, and a national column in a professional journal.

I Took Early Retirement To Teach Others

When I took early retirement in December of 2005 to start my own business, I decided to share my simple market segmentation process with other small business owners. I first updated the market segmentation research from my decade of column articles. I organized them into an e-book that I now call Know ‘em Sell ‘em: How To Discover The Best Appeals For Your Target Market.

Then I decided to automate my market segmentation process to make it even easier for small business owners to use. The result is an automatic target market analysis that is undoubtedly the quickest and easiest process around. And for a limited time, I’m offering a free one-time trial of it.

You Can Access Your Free Trial Market Analysis by completing the form below:

Come back for tomorrow’s post.

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Posted 6-23-06: My Market Segmentation Experience

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The advantages and risks of outsourcing have been the topic of this week’s posts.

You can access the first four posts by clicking the links below:
Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing Your Marketing
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Advantages 2-3
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risks 1-2
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 3

Today’s post on the advantages and risks of outsourcing covers a fourth risk.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 4 - You May Not Develop Needed Staff Skills

As long as you outsource a one-time job or one that you need completed infrequently, outsourcing has advantages over training you staff. But if you use a skill often, you or an employee need to have that skill.

When you can get a job completed internally, you have greater control and can usually get the work done faster.

Plus, you’re building a team who can do whatever you need done. So if you need the same type of work repeated often, it’s worth investing in your own employees.

I often pay an employee by the hour to learn processes that I could hire done much cheaper, but I consider training them a long-term investment in my business.

If you take this approach, you can save time and money in the long-run by getting training aids to speed employees’ learning. For instance, I sell an e-book version of Strategic Publications for $49.95 and a paper-back version for just $79.95.

The information in this book can save you many times its cost by providing the best information available on designing all major types of publications.

I also sell an ebook version of Know’ em Sell ‘em for just $47. It explains exactly how to conduct a target market profile and provides many already completed for you.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Conclusion

Outsourcing provides a resource of inexpensive specialized skills for your business. It usually saves you money over having an employee learn the skills. However, outsourcing is not without risks.

Being aware of both advantages and risks of outsourcing will enable you to make good outsourcing decisions. If you do decide to outsource a job, I recommend one of the following outsource services:
Scriptlance.com.
Rentacoder.com

I hope you have found this series of posts on the advantages and risks of outsourcing helpful.

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Posted 6-20-08: Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing:
Risk 4

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I’ve been posting on the advantages and risks of outsourcing in this series. You can access the previous posts at the links below:

Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing Your Marketing
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Advantages 2-3
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risks 1-2

To get to the next post in this series, click on the following link:
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 4

Today’s post covers a third risk of outsourcing.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 3 – Vendors May Abuse Access To Your Site Administration

If you are outsourcing a job totally independent of your site, you want be taking this risk. But if you are outsourcing a script or program to be installed on your site, vendors need access to your site administration.

I believe that most outsource vendors are honest, but I’m often too trusting. Let me give you an example of when that trust cost me dearly.

When I first outsourced for a coder to write the code for my target market program for AutoMarketAnalysis.com, the coder missed deadline after deadline. I extended the final deadline twice. By the end of that time, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to do the job. So I went though the services arbitration system and they cancelled that contract so I could hire another programmer.

AutoMarketAnalysis.com shares hosting with another of my sites, Strategic-Publications.net. At this time, AutoMarketAnalysis had little content because the program wasn’t developed yet. But Strategic-Publications.net had 100s of pages. In giving the outsource vendor access to the former, I also gave him access to the latter.

Within three days of canceling my contract with the vendor, someone got in to my administration account and deleted all pages for Strategic-Publications.net.

Luckily I had backed-up the content on one of my office computers so the content wasn’t lost. Still it took a week for one of my employees to upload those pages and reformat them. So it cost me that employee’s salary.

Now I can’t prove that the outsource vendor deleted the pages. But in my two years of hosting Web sites, it has never happened before or since. What would you think?

The lesson you should learn from this post is to guard your site access and don’t give any outsource vendor more information than they need to complete your job. Otherwise you may find that in the advantages and risks of outsourcing, the risks may outweigh the advantages.

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Posted 6-19-08: Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing:
Risk 3

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For my last two posts, I’ve discussed the advantages and risks of outsourcing, concentrating on the advantages.

You can access those posts by clicking the links below:
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing Your Marketing
Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Advantages 2-3

But outsourcing does have risks as well. Today’s post covers two of those risks. My next posts will cover two more risks and conclude my posts on the advantages and risks of outsourcing. You can access it by clicking the link below:

Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing: Risk 3

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 4

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 1 – An Outsourced Job May Take Longer Than One Completed Internally

I’ve heard some gurus say that they can post a job with an outsource service in the morning and have the job completed that evening. But that hasn’t been my experience.

Most outsource services prefer that you list a job for several days before making a selection. And it’s to your advantage to do so if you want the best person for the job.

Even before you post the job, you must determine and write your job description, specifications, benchmarks and final deadline.

This takes more time than just telling an employee what you want done. The employee can ask questions and get answers quickly. But unanswered questions cost more time with an outsource vendor.

Plus, I’ve had outsource vendors go days without reporting their progress and then learned that they did nothing on my job during that time.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risk 2 – Follow-Up Support Is Scarce

After completing a job and getting paid, many outsource vendors are impossible to get in touch with and won’t provide follow-up support.

Most of the outsource services forbid their participating vendors from contacting you directly because they don’t get paid if the vendor works with you directly on future projects. Thus, your only medium of communication is through the outsource service. Add to this that many outsource vendors speak and write little English, and you have a real communication problem.

Once a job has been completed, the vendor no longer monitors communications regarding it. You can leave messages for vendors, but most will never see those messages.

Of course, if you can’t get in touch with them, you can’t ask questions about what they’ve done or get support if you discover something wrong after you have paid.

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Posted 6-18-08: Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing:
Risks 1-2

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The advantages and risks of outsourcing is the topic of this series posts.

I started it with an introduction and the first advantage of outsourcing. If you missed that post, you can access it at Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing Your Marketing. Today’s post continues with two more advantages.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Advantage 2- Reviews And Samples Aid Selection

Reviews are often available so you consider more than just price in your selection. All outsourcing services use some kind of review process, including comments by other business owners who have used that outsource vendor before.

You can also ask to see samples of the vendor’s work. I asked the freelance editors to provide a publication that they had frequently edited. I also looked at videos before selecting the video editor and Drupal sites before selecting my programmer.

Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Advantage 3 - If Vendors Don’t Complete Work According To Your Specifications, You Don’t Have To Pay Them

Another great advantage of outsourcing is that you can specify exactly what a job entails and set deadlines. If the vendor fails to meet specifications or deadlines, you aren’t stuck with a bill for work that you can’t use.

This can save you loads over assigning a staff member to do the job because you have to pay employees’ salaries whether they complete a job satisfactorily or not.

Of course, you can fire an employee who consistently fails to perform assigned tasks, but that’s much more complicated than canceling an outsource job that’s behind schedule or doesn’t meet your job specifications.

If these advantages appeal to you and you want to outsource a present job, I recommend that you go to one of the links below and sign up for an account. It’s easy:

Scriptlance.com.
Rentacoder.com

To get to the next post in this series, click the following link: Advantages And Risks Of Outsourcing: Risks 1-2

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Posted 6-17-08: Advantages and Risks of Outsourcing:
Advantages 2-3

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