One of my favourite sayings is; “start with the end in mind.” In other words, make sure you know what your outcome is, before you decide to take action.
I was thinking about this earlier, when I received an email from a reader, who had just realised that the time and money she had been investing in marketing her website and blog over the past 18 months, had been pretty much a total waste of time!
Yes, she had seen ‘traffic’ into them increase from zero to around two thousand unique visitors a day – but it hadn’t generated anything tangible for her or her business. In fact, it had actually hurt her business; because her time spent blogging, online networking and doing SEO had limited the amount of chargeable work she could do for her clients.
Marketing goals
This lady’s original marketing goal for her website and blog, was to showcase her skills as a business finance expert to a new audience and then convert some of these readers into paying clients. However, she became so focused on producing regularly updated content and getting her Search Engine Optimisation ‘just right’ that she was using these numbers to track her success – rather than the actual number of new clients and enquiries she was getting.
This is a common scenario, when someone gets so involved in the mechanics of a marketing activity, that the activity itself becomes their goal – rather than a tool to help them reach their goal.
Taking stock
If you have a commercial website or blog, how focused are you on the tangible or bankable results you get from it?
I am not talking about hits, metrics, comments or subscriber numbers – I’m talking about actual, business results, what your accountant would call your ROI (return on investment).
Here are some examples of questions we all need to ask ourselves, if we invest our time and/or money on a website or blog:
- If your site/blog is there to generate enquiries for your business – how many is it generating each day and what quality are they?
- If your site/blog is supposed to be generating advertising revenue, how much money is it making for you each week?
- If your site/blog is supposed to be positioning you as an authority in your area of expertise, how many more calls are you getting from newspapers, trade publications and the media – wanting your opinions?
It does us all good from time to time, to take stock of where we are and to ensure that everything we are investing our time, money and energy in is actually taking us toward our business goals. Otherwise, we run the risk of rowing our boat REALLY hard in the wrong direction and suddenly wondering why we are in the wrong place after all that hard work.
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Jim, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
You need to have an overarching strategy and then everything on your website, the way you market, how you sell and even your behaviour needs to be congruant with this and lead you on the path to you achieving your goals.
For example, I was with a client the other week and I asked them:
“What’s your most wanted response for your website?”
“Uhhh – to earn more money” was the reply
XXXX WRONG ANSWER XXXX
That response was just too generic. I mean what’s your most wanted response from the visitor?
What do you want them to do?
Download info?
Make an enquiry?
Purchase a product?
Get an idea that you are the market leader?
Get a warm fuzzy feeling from the experience? (!!!)
What is it?
And then you should map out your website and your marketing accordingly.
Once you know what your MWR (most wanted response) is, you need to measure it?
My old mentor once said, you can manage what you can measure and with a website this is SOOOOO important. You need to know and understand the numbers of your business so you can test, tweak and modify as you go.
Don’t just concentrate on irrelant stats like hits if it’s not relevant to your goals.
Sean McPheat
Sean,
Thanks for such a well-written and valuable comment.
If anyone ever wanted to demonstrate the value of a blogs comments, they need to see comments like yours.
Thanks!!
It’s kind of tough to just up and stop writing a blog. I use my business blog for the same reason as the person who wrote you, and I’d have to say that I have the same results as she had; rather, lack of results.
However, I see it somewhat differently at the same time. One of my reasons for having a business blog is to have consistently new content, so as to keep my site fresh with new content. I have little doubt it’s helped, as I’ve been writing this blog for 5 years now.
Still, it hasn’t done what I had hoped it would, for the most part. It’s promoted me, but I’ve never gotten any business because of it. That’s a shame, but I do think it has served at least a couple of my purposes over the years.
Mitch,
If after 5 years your blog has not generated any business for you, you really need to examine why.
The thousands of hours you have dedicated to it should have produced tangible (bankable) results long ago.
Jim, to say “you really need to examine why” doesn’t really mean anything. I’ve spent hours, heck, years, trying to figure it out. You kind of told me what I already knew.
Mitch,
I stand 100% behind my comment – but would add that you ALSO need to get some outside, expert assistance, if you can’t see what’s wrong.
It’s impossible for anyone, without investing their time and expertise in studying your blog and your business, to give you the tailored help you need.
@mitch,
Im no marketing expert but if you reckon you have already been examining your blog for 5 years and you still ain’t getting nowhere, I dont think you looked real hard?
Certainly can’t be bothering you too much or you would fixed it years ago – no?
Learn how to spell, who would listen, to you! Hello spell check!
I definitely agree with you Jim. A lot of people base their success on hits when based on their goals, hits don’t translate to success. I’ve definitely been guilty of this with my blog. I have received a decent amount of opportunities through my blog so I’m doing something right, but if I don’t see that stat graph going up, I still get disappointed.
I guess if you’re getting more hits then you’re catching more eyes and therefore, creating more chances for new business opportunities…but you always hear stories about posts that receive tons of hits because it was a big buzz post or got a lot of diggs, but never actually provided any visitors of real value. You have to look at who you want to read your blog and what would be interesting to them. It may not be a post suitable to drive a great deal of traffic, but it will drive the right, or valuable traffic.
@Mitch Perhaps your problem is that you’re more concerned with keeping your site updated with fresh content than with providing valuable content that creates business opportunities. You’ve heard it plenty of times I’m sure, but are you looking for quantity or quality?
Dave