In my early days of writing about LinkedIn I wrote a post about the wisdom or otherwise of women using sexy images of themselves as profile photos and banner images. I was attempting to raise it as a legitimate question and shared an example I'd seen on the platform. Big mistake! I was accused of trolling the woman (who I'd not named) and received a barrage of abusive comments. After it hit 30,000 views and showed no sign of slowing, I removed the offending post and apologised to the woman (who never acknowledged my transgression). The big lesson? People don't actually read what's written; they read what they think is written. So never post something controversial without considering it from all angles. PS I've never made this mistake again!
I lost almost 15.000$ in a paid ad campaign whilst boosting my facebook ads for a startup in South Africa. When targeting on facebook you can select interests, job titles and other demographics. However, due to culture and unemployment in South Africa, there's a considerable amount of 'business owners' in the country. Yup, they don't have any money and are definitely not interested in purchasing legal services. Money well wasted. You need to study your target demographic on a local and cultural level, don't just target in country A because it worked in your own country. Paid performance is a proper carreer that well falls within the 10.000 hours of mastering a skill.
After years of operation, we made one mistake that continues to teach us about how to find customers who really want our products and services: chasing traffic rather than intent. When we chased traffic, we created a lot of broad-based, high-volume content that generated high traffic statistics in our analytics, yet brought in many low-quality leads. Our salespeople spent more time trying to close these low-quality leads and they closed fewer of them. By cutting back on this low-quality content and creating content centered on real purchase decisions such as service structures, service limits and operational risk, we increased productivity for our salespeople and improved their conversion rates. As a result, we shortened the cycle from lead to customer due to a higher percentage of quality leads. If I could do it over again, I would qualify leads earlier in the process. Ultimately, traffic numbers are a vanity metric; revenues are driven by the alignment of your content to what your business actually does.