Dear Friend,
Today I am an early riser. Normally I wake up with an alarm at six and must force myself to get up, but now I cannot sleep and I silently sneaked out of bed to make sure no-one wakes up in the house.
My mind is boiling with ideas and things that I need to get down on paper, so here we go.
It is thief’s hour. Between 03.00 and 04.00 everybody sleeps, accept thieves. And bakers. And me.
Free publicity
Currently, I have three businesses going on. The first is my advertising agency, Houdyk. The second is ncfi.nl.
NCFI stands for Nederlands Centrum voor Financiële Informatie (Dutch Centre for Financial Information) and here is where I sell a handful of digital products. This business now generates enough passive income to live from!
My third endeavour is “Termitero” a bioconstruction company. Honestly, I am just building my own house, but I have the ambition that this will become a first project of many more to come. Therefore, I am documenting everything to generate promotional materials.
This is the first time I created the Facebook page before I had a live website. I made sure to have the domain termitero.com registered (still in development) but things happen on Facebook here.
A few months back, in December, I organised a workshop where we invited a bioconstruction specialist to teach us how to build with Hiperadobe. This earth bag building technique is developed in Brazil and is a tropicalization of Superadobe. Hiperadobe involves mesh tubular bags instead of polypropylene bags.
In short, we are 3d printing our house with huge earth filled sausages.
We are the first doing so in Bolivia. My advertisement on Facebook to promote our workshop called the attention of a reporter. This week, our building project was featured in a respected magazine for architects and engineers. And we are not even half way through the build!
That is something cool happening. Free publicity is super powerful.
The potential of advertising
What happened yesterday shocked even me. It was almost scary. I have experienced the true power of advertising.
Let me show you what happened.
My workers never show up. Because we are not continuously working at the building site and most people prefer to work full time, it is hard to find people.
That is what I thought until now.
The day before yesterday I created an ad.
I will translate it for you:
Construction Worker Wanted
Do you need work? If you have the right attitude and want to learn a new building technique this is for you.
Send me a message now at WhatsApp: 123456789
It was distributed in a radius of 2 kilometres (1.24 mile) without any additional filters. Not age or gender. Just distance relative to the work site.
These are the results.
It is in Spanish, but we all speak in dollars. Twenty-five cents of a dollar. That is what I spent before to pause the ad with 238 persons reached in paid traffic. Organically it reached another 100 people more.
That may not seem like a lot. But I have received 24 job applicants using Facebook. When I woke up yesterday, I had another dozen or so people sending me messages via WhatsApp and during the day I received many phone calls too.
People are lining up to get to work.
I realized two things here. First, I realized what is the potential of advertising. In a way, it became so overwhelming I could not handle all of the incoming messages and calls. Imagine creating such frenzy for a product you sell.
Secondly. There seems to be a huge opportunity for employment agencies in Bolivia. Perhaps elsewhere too, using this simple method. As far as I know there are no employment agencies here.
Everyday opportunities present themselves. Too many to act upon, so that is why I share some of the things that I notice with you. Who knows, you might be interested to take a chance on it.
Note: This blog was published first in the may edition of The Power of Micropayments. So now and then I will select featured content to keep sharing with my blog readers what I’m up to. If you want to read it all, and be one of the few I will share more sensitive tactics with. Join me, and Feel the Power for Yourself.
