You Just Don’t Get It

You just don’t get it. Do you?

I have to respect you because you took the leap of faith, that you are trying to do whatever you can to grow your business, to sustain it, to build a legacy, and to prove your own self-worth. Yeah, but still, you just don’t get it.

You started a business because you’d profit from it. You take risks. You invest before you get anything in return. You build networks never knowing who’d help you and how. You put faith in yourself and your team.

Yet, you just don’t get it.

You do so much for your business, and yet you screw up.

How, you ask?

You just don’t listen. You refuse to budge. You are too proud to admit that you cannot be wrong. You aren’t open to ideas. You refuse to try new ways to do marketing. At least, you refuse to do precisely works and do everything else that absolutely won’t make a difference to your business.

You stick to your guns, even if you are wrong

You know what? There’s this thing called ego. I know it well because I have it too. I was guilty of this when I first got started.

Every decision you make – for your business, for your own personal life, and for digital marketing – has repercussions.

You could be adamant, strong-willed, determined, focused, and passionate. For entrepreneurs, it’s these very traits that make them who they are.

Sometimes though, those very traits can hurt. They can leave you panting behind your competition.

Do you know why successful entrepreneurs hire people smarter than them, more efficient than them, and more capable than them?

Because these entrepreneurs know that they can’t do everything all the time and that they just might not know (or miss something critical) while at work.

Every time you insist on “this is how I want it”, “this is the way things are done around here”, you are losing out on a potentially possible opportunity to change. To do something better.

Smoker goes to doctor complaining about throat problems. Doctor says, “Stop smoking”. Smoker nods. Goes back to smoking. Still complains about the throat problems.

What would the doctor do?

Your perfectionism & Attention to Detail Hurts

I’ve had clients fussing over keyword density. They fuss over sentences used, rhetoric, wordplay, grammar, syntax, style, tone, and some more keyword density.

I am not saying those are not important (except for keyword density which is not important).

But nothing justifies you spending 3 months perfecting a single blog post. There are no excuses for that kind of attention to detail.

It’s madness. You need a psychotherapist. Got it?

The point is this, and I always ask clients when they fuss too much over any one thing in particular: What’s the ROI of all this? What did we achieve? How did the company gain exactly?

Blogging is opinionated writing to establish your credibility and authority. You gain that by writing insights and share interesting stuff with your potential customers.

Your insistence on doing “Only” SEO, the wrong way

I am not against SEO at all. In fact, I help clients do it. I am, however, against how it’s done sometimes.

Want to make SEO work for you? Just do this:

• Invest in high-quality writers that write with passion, authority, and strength.
• Do basic On-Page SEO – for every page and every post you publish. If you use WordPress, just use the Yoast Plugin.
• Get on Social Media — across the board — and keep your accounts active.
• If your budget, time, and resources permits, get some high-quality guest blogging done (I still think Guest Blogging is overrated though)

Just don’t do shit that you thought “was” the way to go.

Everyone and their dog wants to invest thousands of dollars on SEO. Guess what they end up buying? Shitty SEO services that are outsourced to some dickheads who never updated themselves on any one of the slew of animal-named updates that Google released over the past few years.

Guess what your local SEO agency does after you invest $600 per month, on a contract, for the next several years?

They are still “submitting your website” to “directories”. They are spam commenting and writing garbage masquerading as articles and blog posts to be published on small blogs hoping to develop “backlinks”

Ask them what they do, and they rant about the “Search engine optimization” strategy.

Instead of spending $600 on Search Optimization techniques that don’t work anymore, you could have just spent $50 per month on Google AdWords. You’d have stayed on top of Google’s SERP and you’d spend less.

If you still want to do SEO, you should be doing massive and epic shit like Gabor does for AionHill. Or like Brian Dean does for Backlinko . Or What Oliver does for Web Matros

Just saying…

Hoping that Social Media Gets You Business

Social media won’t make you money; at least not directly. Stop paying cash to grow your fans and followers.

if you want to promote, boost your growth, or grow your network, use Social PPC. Advertise on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Just don’t buy gigs like these:

If you do, you suck. Plain and simple. It doesn’t even work and in fact, it messes up everything. See what Kimron Corion of HuffingtonPost figured out after her client insisted on “buying Facebook likes”

• You get false pride and fake fans or followers.
• Poor or no engagement.
• Messes up your Edge rank.
• You lose real fans, real fast.
• You’ll never make money off a fake list – no leads and no sales.

You can’t buy your way into people’s hearts and minds.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth mentioning it again. There’s “social” in social media. It’s not your entrepreneurial grandpa’s marketplace. Don’t hope to “sell” on social platforms.

Instead, build your network. Get in touch with people. Build some real relationships. Share content that you think genuinely helps your fans and follows.

Talking about fans and followers, you’d either grow them organically – just based on the wonderful relationships you’ve made or the amazing content you share. Or maybe off your celebrity status, the power of your brand, or an authority that you’d have become.

Google Adwords? Facebook Ads? My Niece Can Do that

That’s right.

Your niece, nephew, the neighborhood kid who originally came to mow your lawn – they can all set up Google ads and Facebook Ads.

But then, what next?

• Will you A/B testing your ads, landing pages, email message copy, email subject lines, CTA buttons, etc.?
• Will you constantly optimize your campaign bids, keep looking for keywords (positive and negative)?
• What tools will you be using?
• Will you worry about post-click marketing?
• Did you set yourself up for marketing automation?
• How are you generating leads? How many leads? What’s the cost per conversion? How much are you spending per month? What can be done to lower the cost of acquisition?
• Then, there are display campaigns, lead generation campaigns, carousel ads, video ads, text ads, and all other kinds of ads.
• What do you about analytics and attribution?
• Plus, we didn’t even talk about native advertising, mobile advertising, PPV traffic, and more. Eh?

Assuming you’d do all the above, do you really have the time for this? If yes, who runs your business?

Digital marketing is not hard; it just has too many moving parts and demands a lot of work on all fronts to make it really work for your business.

I mean well for you. I want you to succeed. With your success, comes mine.