The right answers to the wrong questions?

One of the problems with people who use a DIY approach to marketing, is that they often waste time and money, looking for answers to the wrong questions.  As a result, the very best they can then hope for, is that they learn how to do the wrong thing, correctly.

I was prompted to write this, after hearing someone talking earlier about the problems they have, because of the URL they are using for their website.  It is hard to spell and apparently, even the site owner’s friends often misspell it.  The URL also has no SEO benefit, as it does not contain anything that a potential customer would associate with the actual products offered by the site.

One of the reasons this blog is on page 1 of Google (and has been for a year) for the term “marketing blog” or “marketing blogs” is that the words marketing blog appear in my URL.  As a result, almost 100% of the 20,000 links that point here, have anchor text that tell Google this site is related to the term marketing blog.

The site I mentioned earlier is pretty new, has just a handful of links pointing to it and apparently, it gets very little traffic.  So, the solution to the guys URL issue is simply to get a more people-friendly and seo friendly URL – and THEN to market the site effectively.  However, the site’s owner was focusing on how to overcome all the problems with the existing URL.  In other words, he was looking for answers to the wrong question.

This is easily the single most common marketing problem I see among business owners and entrepreneurs.  To quantify that, I would guess that well over 95% of the marketing questions people ask me, fit into this category.

Of course, the reason this is such a widespread problem, is that the people who are right now wasting their time and money looking for answers to the wrong questions, are totally unaware.  They will think that I wrote this post for someone else.

I produce a great deal of free marketing material, in an effort to help as many people as possible.  As someone who’s passionate about helping people, this conundrum is perhaps my biggest frustration.