Tales from the Crypt of Online Marketing #20
Bustin’ up the fairy tales they keep telling you to do
We have been living in a fairy tale last week. Well, more like a nightmare with this scorching heat that has engulfed the Pacific Northwest with record temperatures!
When I was younger I couldn’t stand the heat at all. He was prone to heat exhaustion, and that was in temperatures nowhere near the heat we had just experienced!
Back then, it was standard to earn a summer income picking berries at a local farm. I didn’t really like picking strawberries because we would have to crawl on our knees all day. But the raspberries were great, as long as you came prepared with long-sleeved shirts to avoid the thorny bushes.
My first year of selection was not so good. It was a hot summer, and I often had to leave at noon, feeling heat exhaustion making me feel. I would spend the afternoon lying on the sofa with a cold pack on my head, feeling sick to my stomach and trying to control my pounding headache.
It only took me a few days like that to figure out a way to stop wasting half a day collecting money. And that was getting up at dawn and being in the patch long before anyone else showed up…including the blazing sun!
He was pretty proud of how he had a couple of flats ready to weigh in before the straw boss showed up. They didn’t make up for all the lost time, but at least some of it was made up by not doing what everyone else was doing.
Are there things you’re doing in your business that everyone else is doing…but just aren’t working?
Every day I read on social media or watch a video of someone telling entrepreneurs what they “should” be doing to make big money in their business.
I cringe every time I see these bold statements of fact.
Because they are rarely true for everyone.
So today, I’m sharing 3 of these online business fairy tales that need to be busted wide open!
fairy tale #1
SINGLE PAGE WEBSITES OR LANDING PAGES WILL GIVE YOU A SIX FIGURE INCOME
The busted truth:
- Maybe that’s true…maybe if you spend several thousand marketing dollars to continuously promote them. And if the ads aren’t done right or the landing page isn’t perfect, you won’t get conversions and you’ll waste a lot of time, effort, and money.
- This model is not sustainable. It’s feast or famine and it only works when your marketing engine is revved up and you have a huge following that will buy anything you can think of because it’s that good.
- This tactic will not get you to the place of running a business. It’s simply a tactic used by ‘gurus’ to make you believe that landing pages and single page websites will grow your business.
fairy tale #2
YOU WILL REACH THE TOP OF THE SEARCH ENGINES, GUARANTEED!
The busted truth:
- No, never believe anyone who promises you this. It’s something no one should promise because no one knows what Google’s algorithms are that make a site rise to the top (except, of course, Google’s own employees).
- The people who make those promises are desperate for your business and will tell you anything to make a sale. Would you do business with someone who doesn’t include their business domain name or phone number in their correspondence?
- They think that you have ‘fool’ written on your forehead and that you are easy prey for their false promises.
- If they were that good at SEO, they would have generated qualified traffic going to their website. They would be so busy that they would never need to cold call or cold email you with those bogus promises to begin with!
- SEO is complex and it’s hard to find people who really know what they’re doing.
- The best thing you can do is research the people you are considering hiring. Ask for references and talk to their happy clients to get a good idea of the integrity of that person or agency.
fairy tale #3
SAVE YOUR MONEY ON AN EXPENSIVE WEBSITE – ANYONE CAN BUILD A SITE TODAY!
The busted truth:
- I’m sorry, but… knowing how to use a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician. That is, just because someone (or you) knows how to install a WordPress theme, doesn’t make you a qualified website developer.
- There is much more to creating a website that will give you the sales and conversions you want and need than simply installing a WordPress theme, changing the colors and photos, and you’re done.
- That is, your website must address these critical components: brand design, user experience, design elements, copywriting and brand messaging, and SEO. Each of these areas requires an expert who understands them in order to offer you a website that will give you the results you want.
- And if you think setting up a (cheap) third-party website like WIX or Weebly will work, it really won’t. They are horrible with SEO and more importantly, you don’t own your website with them! You will end up paying more in the long run than if you had created a proper website to begin with.
The moral of this fairy tale? Hire a full-service agency that has all of these experts working for you as a team, and you’ll go much further than trying to go the cheap route.
For the success of your business,
Suzanne
