Its About The Marketing Stupid

Or Creating and Failing

Create,create, create. Content isn’t king, it is just content. Nobody goes into an empty shop and nobody goes into a shop with little stock. It doesn’t matter if it looks beautiful (design)

I tell people to try, fail, create, test their content. But creating content is like diet and exercise. People understand the benefits of it and still don’t do it. So suck in your stomach and push away the distractions today.

I tell every single one of my new clients that a website is waste of time if they don’t market it or even create content. Do I lose business because of this? No. Because people still believe that their website will buck the trend.

Most of them still go ahead and get the website. they may as well have gotten a block of wood in most cases. Seriously.

A website isn’t a brand or a solution. It is a collection of (often uninteresting) words that too many people think will attract visitors.

Great words and content will attract visitors but you need to get out there and tell them!

Not a Lot of Work to Get Going

Often for a narrow niche it doesn’t take too much work to raise above the mediocre competition that already exists out there with content alone.

An hour or two a week may get you started. Sometimes you may get addicted. All too often we are addicted to doing nothing.

So instead of watching that useless TV show or mindlessly browsing Facebook why not take 15 minutes out of your day to try and become a content creator.

Market it Baby

Don’t be the falling tree in the middle of the forest. Share what you have done. First with friends and acquaintances through email

Hi John

Can you look at what I am doing here and give me some feedback. See you for lunch next week. Don’t be afraid to give comments.

Easy as that. Then hit the social networks and share a few times, yes a few it won’t hurt to share it at least twice.

Then file it away and look back at it in a week and see how you could have done better.

Hundreds of Hits

Lets be honest your article on how to change the oil on a 1979 Ford Escort may not get hundreds of hits or be the new Gangman style video on YouTube but I always tell people to write the piece of content as if it was going to be the front page article on their local newspaper. It definitely focuses the mind then.

Ah but you don’t want that sort of exposure. You just want it to live in a lonely cave where nobody can see it.

Get a grip of course you want it to be seen.

But I Can’t Write I’m Crap

Ok you can’t write, don’t have the time ( which I don’t believe).

Then hire a copywriter. Get a professional to write the article. They will work with you and provide a top notch piece of content for you.

When I worked in elearning we had writers (they were called Instructional Designers) they used to write an amazing range of courseware on topics from Microsoft Word to Cisco routers.

They didn’t know the first thing about the topics. We used Subject Matter Experts for the actual information.

They would interview the experts then work with graphic designers and then produce training materials that would be sold and used to train people to become experts.

So use an expert in writing to do the work if you don’t want to do it. They will do a good to great job for you depending on the quality of information you give them.

Its OK to Mess Up

Remember when you were in school and you had an essay and it came back from the teacher with the dreaded red pen all over it (mine did I must admit). But you still got a mark for it. I bet you never got 100%.

The same applies to your writing online. Nobody expects you to get 100% and you never will as people have different opinions on everything. Its called human nature.

So its OK to not write the perfect article. The professional writers above used to put their writing through quality control and there was no recorded instance ever of one not having some correction.

Just Get Started OK?

So just get started. Close twitter, Facebook, the sports page online. Turn off your phone. Close the door of the office. Pop on some soothing music (Omniwriter comes with background music).

Open up a text editor and type for 10 minutes about some element of what you do, make or sell. There you are done thats your beginning

Rinse and repeat.