Concentrate And Emphasize Your Strengths

Have you ever had an insanely busy day in what you accomplish so much and did incredibly large amounts of work? Additionally, have you ever had a day in which you got the same advice from multiple trusted sources in relation to the same issue? Yesterday, was both of those days for me. We receive very good advice daily from people we trust, authorities, and loved ones. Yet why does it often taken so long, or so many exposures for it to sink in?

Lets get something to sink in…

Concentrate On Your Strengths

Every business or industry can be sub-categorized many times. Each of those sub-categories will then have different specializations which can be concentrated on. In the businesses revolving around hobby board games, which is of course a sub-category itself, we have a number of different areas to sub-categorize:

Board game design
Board game development
Game agent
Board game artwork (design, illustration, manufacturing liaison)
Board game publishing
Game manufacturing
Game fulfillment
Game distribution
Retail game store
Board game related media, blogs, news, social networks
Board game marketing

Within each of these sub-categories there are a plethora of ways to specialize and become the best. I propose that if you can rise to the top of any particular specialty of a sub-category that you will be able to make a decent to good living. The difficultly for me is maintaining my focus and not straying from the particular path of specialization desired. Here is a good gamer analogy…

If you were playing a RPG and decided that your character would be a cleric/healer, then every time you leveled up you would concentrate on improving skills, stats, and equipment for the purpose of healing. You would not decide to start down the path of becoming a wizard type spellcaster. You might decide to add in some fighting skills in case the enemies ever singled you out and tried to kill you. However, of course you would need to weigh the advantages of being tougher to the advantages of being a better healer. Why is it often difficult to apply these principles to real life?

Specializing In Marketing

Maybe it is because I am a salesman and/or teacher at heart. Maybe it is because I now have over 5 years of experience selling and teaching in the finance industry with a sub-category specialization of personal financial planning. Whatever the reason, I find myself continuing to specialize in the process of marketing board games. I find it the most enjoyable, the easiest to get good ideas for and more importantly implement those same good ideas. I am already quickly moving down the path of custom building the resources I feel that I require to sell tons of games.

Yet at times I find myself wanting to stray from the path to work on game component sourcing, fulfillment, distribution, game liquidations, etc. In fact, I even acted on doing some game liquidation at the beginning of this year. For the effort applied, I certainly made a respectable amount of money. I put in about 4 hours of work communicating with Z-Man about stuff to liquidate, creating emails, creating a blog post, and re-checking that everything worked. For the effort I made $260 profit after all expenses plus some additional inventory worth approximately $250 if sold at liquidation prices. Certainly a good return per hour invested. I spent significant time, effort, and money getting to a point where I could do this. The goal here was to test if I could see significant benefit to hire somebody to handle board game liquidations. Not there yet.

The problem is that I could have spent that 4 hours personally on work that would not provide an immediate income stream but rather would amplify the long-term income potential of Tasty Minstrel Games.

Conclusion

I have thus concluded that my best use of efforts in on the overall marketing efforts surrounding Tasty Minstrel Games. I began with the easiest fruit to pick by building a voice within the existing community of Board Game Geek. If you want to shoot an elephant you need to so where the watering hole is. Similarly, if you want people to buy hobby board games and become evangelists for them, then you need to target your marketing efforts to people who already do that. The only thing that you need to convince them of is that they should be emotionally invested in your success.

I have thus far scattered many seeds in that particular community. Hopefully enough will take root and grow that they may start spreading seeds for me. Thankfully I am currently seeing evidence of that. At this point in time, I need to scatter some seeds in different related communities which can boost sales. After which, I can come back and spread yet more seeds and so forth.

If you are on Facebook, you really should become a fan of Tasty Minstrel Games. I have some cool things planned and would love it if you could not only become a fan, but also suggest to your friends to become fans. Thanks!