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Everything is Grist for the Writing Mill
When you first start a blog, you are full of ideas. Coming up with the next one is not difficult at all. For at least the first three days!
Somewhere between 3 and 15 days, you start to wonder how you are going to keep it up. You usually struggle for a while – learning how to brainstorm for ideas of things to write. Then a slow change takes place. You begin to think about blogging throughout the day – topics occur to you at the most unusual times. You find yourself thinking, “I should blog about this!”.
When you become a true blogger, you realize that everything is grist for the mill. You don’t have to produce something profound every time. It just needs to be something of interest, worth writing down. I can blog about watching the tree bud from the livingroom window near my office chair. I can blog about how in between business projects I am thinking about the garden we’ll grow this summer. I can blog about how nice it is to be able to weave the necessities of life into my daily employment. I don’t have to produce Pulitzer Prize quality editorials every time!
I used to blog once a week. When I did that, I could mull over what I said, really think out a conclusion, consider what the most important thing was. It was a column, more than a blog. Useful, and appreciated, but different.
Since stepping up the pace, I’ve noticed a change in how I write. I’m less concerned with the huge concept, more able to explore the trivial. Sometimes there is value in trivia – not that it should ALL be trivia, but, like the old parenting argument of “quality versus quantity”, sometimes we actually define the profound better in detailing the small things than we do in trying to consolidate it into a large conclusion.
The essence of blogging changes when we blog more frequently. I don’t think it changes in a bad way, because I think those profound editorials still find their way in. But we find the opportunity to explore more things in a more detailed way, as well as just dash of peripheral or surface observations in a way that we miss when we are focusing on one thing a week.
Give yourself the freedom to explore things in a new way. When that happens, you find a voice you did not know you had.
This article is a companion to an article on Keeping Track of Blogging Ideas on our MicroWeb Blog Community blog.
Personal Photos on a Business Website
I recommended to the real estate agent that she put a photo of herself on the home page of her website. Two days later, someone on a forum we both participated in posted a long article about how putting photos on a home page was tacky, and how no real business did that. The woman I recommended it to gave me the email equivalent of the pitying look, and went elsewhere.
I still recommend a home page photo to real estate agents, and to a few other select business professionals. I do not recommend it as a success tactic for most businesses, though I do recommend that they use photos of themselves on the site where appropriate. Yes… it makes you look like a Mom and Pop business. But guess what? People LIKE Mom and Pop businesses! The key point is, to use the photo in the right way for your business.
You see, a photo on the home page for a product sales business, or even most services, makes you look overeager, and self-promoting. But for some businesses, and some purposes, photos of the business owner or personnel are highly effective.
- For microbusinesses, the only advantage you have over a corporation is personal attention. They can outgun you on just about every other front, but you can be more personal than they can ever be. So placing a photo of yourself on the about page, (not on the home page!) or photos of your employees, gives the business a face and conveys that message of personal touch. That’s something large corporations cannot really do, though they really try to imply that they can.
- For personal service businesses like real estate, or insurance, where the agent IS the difference, a photo actually belongs on the home page. If they want impersonal service, they go to Realtor.com. When they want a real person, they look for a real estate agent’s own website. Putting a face on it right up front helps to reinforce the message that they found what they were looking for. The agent’s personality is HUGE with that kind of website, and a photo, if done well, helps to appeal to the kind of people the agent wants to be working with. Without the photo, the site loses that moment of instant message of a real person being behind the agency. In this instance, the agent IS the purpose of the website, so the photo is an integral part of the purpose of the website, which is, to introduce the agent.
Unless you are emphasizing that you are a family business, leave off the kids and the dog. But get the human touch in there. It helps you to compete with big business in a way they just can’t touch!
The Pink Book
I’ll be teaching Blogging for Business this summer for the University of Wyoming Enrichment Program. I figured that while I know the software pretty well, perhaps a little more info on blogging might be of use, so I went to the bookstore to see what I could find.
The only blogging book they had was pink. I opened it to see if it had anything of use in it. The page I opened to actually had a useful tidbit of information on it, so I assumed from that page, and from the promises of real information on the back cover, that the book would be useful… Ah, the danger of assumptions based on first impressions!
I got the book home, and read the first fluffy chapter. Lots of girlfriend chatter, lots of giggling and an assumption that I needed a great deal of hand holding. The first chapter basically said that blogging was big, that it was fun, and that I’d learn a lot. It took about 5 pages to say that, with cutesy and distracting infoboxes scattered across the pages. They then presented me with a recipe for cocktails lest the information had been too stressful, and in case I just really needed to wind down after absorbing that critical knowledge.
The next chapter was no better – I had to really WORK to get useful information out of the giggly text, it felt more like talking to a 1980s LA Airhead, who knew something, but couldn’t quite pinpoint how to communicate it – instead of too many “y’know”s, it was peppered with more verbose inanities. The recipe at the end of the second chapter wasn’t any help either.
By the time I got to the end of the book, I was still wondering when I’d get to the helpful part. I’d learned how to open an account in about 6 different blogging platforms, that I COULD choose other options for blogging (but not how), and I’d learned how to keep my typing fingers baby soft, where to find good lip balm, what the hottest gossip blogs were (c’mon girls, I have a LIFE!), how to make several different kinds of alcoholic drinks, how to model a blog after RuPaul’s blog (I’m a REAL woman, folks!), how to throw a really good block party (including tips on getting good decorations), and I’d been warned multiple times that if I danced unclothed on the table at a party, or photocopied my bare body parts on the office copier, and posted photos on the internet that it might affect my reputation with prospective employers (I found their assumption that their readers would be that kind of people incomprehensible). They also had the attitude that one night stands, getting naked in public, or taking photos of either was fine, that making a good drinking blog was a cool thing, but they sternly warned me that I could get the wrong kind of weight loss pill ads on a blog if I used context ads.
Where there should have been realistic warnings, there were only ridiculous scenarios that bore so little relation to real life, that no one would even connect it to the things they really NEEDED to be warned against.
Each area that ought to have had genuine information gave a token nod in that direction, and then swept on past in a gaggle of idle chatter and empty fluff. The book was 2/3 filler, and 1/3 information, and the information was incomplete, vague, and only really good if someone just needed someone to say, “I know blogging is this scary thing that is such a huge commitment that you need me to hold your hand while you click the “Signup” button to get your new account.” Where there should have been a list of a dozen things, there were three. Where there should have been genuine help, there was just common knowledge passed off as a helpful tip. Anyone who has been in the blogging community for a week would not need the book, and anyone who is starting a blog would read this one and wonder what they do after they click the signup button.
It was so much work to actually garner any helpful info from the book, that by the time I finished I was really fatigued. It made me tired just trying to string together the scattered bits. They could have taught the same stuff in about 30 pages, and STILL had room for jokes. David Pogue sets an admirable example.
I’m not the only person who disliked this book. There are three negative reviews of it on Amazon, and they pretty much thought the same thing I did. There are a number of good ones also, mostly fluffy. Most people who dislike a book WON’T give it a negative review. They’ll just toss it, or resell it. There are a lot of copies of it for sale used on Amazon also.
Was the book a waste of money? I did learn about three things that I really wanted to learn, though none of them were covered in enough depth to have had any relevancy or usefulness to someone who had less background on how to apply them than what I have. It certainly was not worth $25. But I also got a great story out of it. When I related the story of the pink book to one of my classes, the students had a really good time of it. It is good for a few laughs, and may be for years to come.
But I also learned something about human nature. When we make the move from doer, to teacher, we sometimes doubt our ability to teach everything we need to teach. We feel that we need more knowledge before we can be the instructor. And often times, we don’t. And we don’t learn that until we go looking for the knowledge, and realize that we have more than many of the others do who are teaching. Self esteem is funny that way.
The Delicate Art of Article Writing
I notice that I learn things, and never really realize that I’ve learned them until I see someone else who hasn’t.
After a disappointing meeting with a prospect yesterday, I did some research on their behalf. The meeting was disappointing not because I did not make a sale – hey, that happens, and I can live with that. It was disappointing because they did not understand what I was trying to tell them. This became painfully clear when I began researching the marketing that had been done for them in the last year.
They told me that article marketing had been done for them. I went digging. I was able to turn up only three mentions on Google of articles with their URL in them. I found a gaggle of them on Yahoo though. And I wish I hadn’t.
The articles were full of gramatical errors, childish statements, wandering sentences, awkward phrases, and worse. They gave no new information, had no appeal. Reading them was painful – I had to force myself to read more than a paragraph because it was hard to follow the convoluted sentences. It had all the feel of someone writing in a second language – one they were almost, but not quite, fluent in. These articles will never be picked up by anyone else and reprinted – no one cares for such poor stuff. Google didn’t bother with them, and no one else will either.
I wish those were the only problems though. It was just the beginning.
First, was the glaring one. The potential legal issues. One article made MORE than suggestive claims of a guarantee on a service that could not possibly be guaranteed. I know for a fact that the owners of the site would never wish such information to be published in their name. Yet they are the ones legally liable for the information in the article, and that article is grounds for a lawsuit by someone who has a bad outcome. Another article made a statement that screening eliminated risks – again, in a profession where risks can never be eliminated entirely. This writer not only stuck their foot in it and dragged the client with them, they set up a legal time bomb. One which may come back to harm the site owner years later.
Second, the articles were not written as article marketing. They were merely thrown together using keywords as a guide for what to write about. There was no effort to target the messages as marketing messages – in fact, some of them were repelling rather than encouraging. They had hyped titles, failed to make any kind of useful conclusion, and often talked more about the negatives than the positives. Not one single article addressed the one compelling reason why someone might choose the site owner’s service over the competition. Not one addressed the one major reason why someone might NOT choose the site owner’s service over the competition. Good marketing messages are a subtle, and often delicate thing to pin down. But they are absolutely ESSENTIAL to successful article marketing.
If you write about a topic for marketing purposes, you must do two things:
1. Provide value to the potential customer. This doesn’t mean writing what you want to write, or just researching a topic and writing about it. It means you have to think about what motivates the customer. What do they want, what are their fears, desires, and hopes? What questions do they have that you can provide an answer for? Provide THEIR value, and article marketing works. But to do that, it is essential that you understand the mind of the customer, and how to address their needs a little, before the sale.
2. Provide information that leads them to you. I’m not talking about the signature line. I’m talking about not giving away your business in your articles, while still providing value. Write about topics that they need to know about as a CUSTOMER, not as a Do-It-Yourselfer (unless your customers are do-it-yourselfers). Consider topics about how to choose service (and give it some teeth, not the usual drivel), how to check up on a hired professional, how to care for their purchases, how to evaluate the value of a product or service, changes in your industry, applied technologies in regard to your product or service (things that predict industry trends, or that enhance value). There are all kinds of topics you can write about which help the customer, but which don’t try to make the customer into the expert.
It is a delicate art. And it is something which requires experience and practice to get right. If you are in a business involving legal, medical, business, financial, or other professional information, then you also need to make sure that certain safeguards are observed to keep you from being held liable for careless statements.
So if you are hiring article marketing services, how do you know if you are getting full value?
1. Ask to review all articles before they are published. You will be legally responsible for every word printed at your request. Make certain that what goes out is worthy of having your name on it! Check to see if it is original, fun to read, informative. Think like your customers – will they appreciate this?
2. Ask for a listing of every place the article was published. This is valuable for two reasons – you can make sure the article was actually posted, and if you learn later that something in an article is inaccurate or that it has a serious problem, you know where to go to start the recall process.
3. Make sure you check out examples of writing before you hire. Sadly, the company that published the articles I was so distressed over had similar writing on their home page. Had the people who hired them read that page, and really thought about it, they’d have hired someone else.
4. Expect to be involved. Any professional who claims to write for your business CANNOT do a good job without involving you. They need to know what makes your business unique. They need you to check to ensure that articles are accurate according to YOUR position on the topic (they can research all they want, but they won’t write what you want if you don’t get involved). Expect to have to brainstorm with a writer for new topics every once in a while – expect to talk things over with them, suggest new directions to go, and work with them. A motivated writer will be giving as many ideas as they get from you, but together you’ll do much more. And a good writer will consider you to be their best resource, and will want to work with you to produce the best possible marketing for your business.
Quality costs more. But what is the use of paying for bad writing that harms your company? Like feathers on the wind, an article carelessly loosed on the web can never be fully taken back. Making sure it is good before it goes is your only means of ensuring that it will go on promoting you well for years to come, instead of giving you a black eye every time you turn around.
The delicate art is worth learning. Because the power of good writing truly is phenomenal.
Bad Ugly Man
The class was talking about how the search engines or Google AdSense may key in on phrases you did not think they would. One of the students spoke up and asked if he could tell a story about that. I said, “of course!”. This was his story:
He had put a web page up, which addressed a technical topic. It had a photo of himself on the page. He watched his traffic, and soon found that he was getting a lot of traffic from Google Images, for the term, “bad ugly man”. He then discovered that if he searched on that term, his picture was the top item returned.
Turns out, his technical topic was “(subject), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. Google paired it up with his photo in an unexpected way! A simple disallow tag for his images folder in his robots.txt file solved the problem, but his illustration was priceless.
AdSense and search engines both do sometimes pull out keywords that you do not expect. This can be a good thing in many instances, because it means that you do not have to worry about overanalyzing keywords or calculating keyword density to mine the long tail of search terms. Rather, you just write well, be descriptive in what you say, and the natural result is usually very good.
Once in a while though, you have to tweak a page. A page on Christian Infertility called “Leah After Judah” pulls all sorts of ads about Judaism and Judaic symbols. It isn’t at all what the page is about. So tweaking had to be done to eliminate or selectively target the right phrases on the pages.
When creating a product catalog, take advantage of the search engine’s propensity to catalog everything – write visual and evocative descriptions. You’ll benefit two ways: You’ll help people want the item more if they read the description, and you’ll just naturally include another series of relevant keywords that will get picked up and used in a way that may surprise you.
The descriptions need not be long, or complicated. Just imagine you are describing the item to someone who cannot see it, and who may not know what it is for. Include colors, features, and some phrases to get them thinking about how to use it, or how they’ll feel when they use it. For example:
“Soft and snuggly throw rug. Cuddle up by the fire and enjoy a winter evening with someone you love. Forest green and black colors give this blanket a woodsy feel. Cotton polyester blend is itch-free, soft, and easy to care for.”
Nothing remarkable about that description. It gives an emotional setting, an accurate description, and some adjectives. It will increase the appeal of the item to both search engines and people.
Of course, if you find that you come out on top for searches on the term “itchy blanket”, you’d want to change something. Otherwise, you can probably sit back and watch something unexpected and good happen, just because you took the time to write something natural, and thoughtful.
Update: This page is now pulling search engine results for the term “ugly man”!
How to Produce Truly Awful Software
The software world is becoming more competitive, and in light of this increased competition, it becomes necessary to give some thought as to how to gain supremacy when producing mediocre or truly horrid software. We have developed the following guidelines to help perpetuate the myth that sub-standard software is a necessary interference with productivity:
1. Steal ideas from other developers. This is necessary to develop a product when you have no creativity yourself. If you insist loudly enough, and often enough, that it was your idea, people will eventually believe you.
2. Prosecute, vigorously, anyone who tries to develop an idea even remotely similar to yours. It does not matter that you stole the idea to begin with.
3. Buy out the competition. This is the best option for squashing upstarts who come up with a truly original idea. This is essential if the idea threatens you with obsolescence. If it is something people really want, you can release your own buggy version a year later, and then use it as proof that the idea was not very good to start with, or, alternately, take credit for the whole thing if you do get it to work on your existing clumsy foundation.
4. Bloat is Beautiful. If there is a more cumbersome and awkward way to write code, use it. If you can increase the size of the program, and the resources it demands, do so. This achieves a range of objectives, from annoyance, to giving the appearance that you actually added something useful to the program.
5. Require as much RAM as possible. This will place an increased financial burden on the users, as well as perpetuating the technological tradition of planned obsolescence. If you also produce computer systems, you are in a win-win situation. You may also buy stock in companies that produce memory chips, and you’ll be able to assure your future financial base.
6. Add unnecessary features. Make them look really good, so it appears that you tried to please your customers. This tactic is especially useful in achieving maximum bloat and memory usage. It has the further benefit of slowing down operations, placing an additional burden on the computer, and interfering with productivity. Unnecessary features need not be stable, unexpected errors, hangs, and restarts serve to lower the overall expectation of quality.
7. Any new feature which is introduced must be accompanied by at least 10 new bugs. Less than this will foster unrealistic expectations of quality in the minds of your users. If possible, bugs should conform to the following ratios:
- 1 in 10 should be serious enough to stop the feature from performing at all, on at least 1/3 of all computers.
- 2 in 10 should cause the computer to require restarting. Complete failure to respond, when multiple programs are opened with unsaved work is optimal.
- 2 in 10 should cause the program to close without warning, or to hang and fail to respond. Under no circumstances should there be a pattern to these behaviors. Corruption of documents in progress is an added bonus.
- The remaining 5 of 10 should produce random annoyances such as inappropriate responses to menu commands, dramatic system slowdown, cryptic error messages, failure to open compatible documents, etc.
Patches and updates should promise solutions to these problems, but should not actually provide them.
8. Plumb the potential of dialog boxes. Dialog boxes with unhelpful information should appear at random. You can use them to notify the user of system processes which they do not need to know about (or do not care about), produce error messages which are not related to any action the user performed, or to delineate steps to a process which could be done in a single step.
9. Confirm everything. The simpler the task, the more annoying it is to confirm it. The less likely people are to make a mistake, the more important it is to put in a dialog box to confirm the task. This feature is a cardinal hallmark of bad software, and helps to keep the annoyance factor high, and the user expectations low, so do not overlook it when putting the finishing touches on your masterpiece.
10. Create the illusion of security on the surface. This will relieve you of the obligation of providing meaningful security protection, while giving you the added benefit of being able to create further interference with productivity. The following dialog (or the written equivalent) should be used as often as possible:
“Your computer is doing something that may present a risk. You may have started this process on purpose, or it may be starting without your knowledge. This process may be harmful to your computer – just because you started it does not mean it is not dangerous. This process may cause considerable harm to your computer, up to, and including, total data loss. On the other hand, this process may be necessary to the function of your computer, and failure to allow it to continue may seriously compromise your ability to use the computer to perform essential functions. Click Yes if you wish to continue this process. Click No if you wish to discontinue this process.”
This warning may be followed by small print, reading: “Continuing this process may void your warranty.”
11. Silence your critics. Use creative methods to punish your critics, while rewarding people who praise your software.
12. Force your users to upgrade. This removes the ability for users to choose an older, more stable version of software over a newer, buggy version. Such choices place an unreasonable burden of quality on you, and give the user an excessive degree of control over their own computer.
13. Assume the user is stupid. This assumption opens all kinds of possibilities for maximization of useless dialog boxes, but also allows you to bury necessary controls so that the user cannot locate them. The potential is far greater though, because an assumption of stupidity of the user also relieves you of the obligation of providing anything that is user-friendly, and increases your ability to create more awkward and cumbersome interfaces to interfere with accomplishing simple tasks.
14. Assume the user must be protected from themselves. Ownership of a computer is too great a burden for the average person, but they do not know this, so you must not let them know that you have protected them from themselves. It is best to create the ILLUSION on the surface that they have control of the software, but the real controls should be hidden, and only accessible if someone is aware of the hidden manner of accessing them. This strategy causes untold frustration in the user, as they repeatedly attempt to access the false controls to set necessary configurations or give permissions, not realizing that the controls they are accessing are not the ones they need to access. Naming the real controls and the false ones with the same name further enhances your ability to feel superior and to frustrate the user.
15. When issuing new versions, maximum effort should be taken to introduce a wide range of new (unnecessary, and useless) features, but persistent problems and annoyances should not be repaired. The prettier you can make the new features, the better – this helps achieve your goal of high RAM requirements, and it helps to make it look like you actually added value when in fact you did not. It is easier and more fun to create eye candy than it is to repair deep problems or patch bugs and security holes. Eye candy has the added benefit of being more visually appealing for promotion of the new version, and is easier to promote than stability, enhanced productivity, or greater ease of use.
16. Change the rules. This is most effective if you can establish a standard way of doing things, and then change it after your user base is finally adapted to it. Making the interface less intuitive than it was originally is optimal. A great way to achieve this is to change everything that works, but do not fix the problems.
17. Provide the illusion of automated help. When errors occur, or programs stop responding, provide a dialog box which offers to find a solution to the problem. No further programming is necessary in this feature, other than a progress bar, followed by a message which says that no solution was found, and which instructs the user to visit the software publisher’s website to look for an update. This feature does not provide any useful function, but leaves the user with the feeling that at least you TRIED to help them. This is an easy, and inexpensive way to enhance public relations, without having to actually provide anything of substance.
The software world is advancing, and becoming ever more complex. Keeping software from performing predictably is in the best interest of every software developer, lest computer users feel that good function is a justifiable expectation. It is our hope that this guideline can assist developers in maintaining the status quo, so that profit margins will not be negatively impacted by the expectation of true progress.
If this guideline is adhered to by current developers, we can look forward to wide vistas of ease and profit in the future.
Pretty Sad
I met with them one morning, in their elegant hotel. It was tastefully decorated – terrific accent colors, deep wood tones, lovely soft-hued wallpaper. It would be so easy to create a website that echoed that easy elegance, that took elements right from the hotel to craft a site that felt like you were taking a virtual visit in the hotel.
I did not impress them. I am just a country web designer to them. They went with a city firm instead. They paid much more than I would have charged. I saw the result last night. It made me want to cry. It has been on my mind ever since.
It is a completely professional design. And that is all. It fails to reflect the elegance and character of the hotel. It looks rather sterile, except for a single texture in one small part of the design where an attempt was made to incorporate a pattern similar to the wallpaper, but the wrong color. It looks like a man tried to design something a woman would like.
The site has flash where it does no good. It has an entrance splash screen, which does nothing for the site other than waste time getting where people really want to go. It has no SEO AT ALL. The copy was written by someone who is not natively from the US, and uses phrases that are not offensive in their native country, but which are offensive and crass in the US. The text is not formatted at all (not even any spaces between paragraphs), there are no legal statements anywhere on the site. There are personal photos where there need to be hotel photos, and one personal photo says, “click to enlarge”. The room photos do not have an enlargement option. Some photos are obviously stock photos (nothing like the land around the hotel). The site organization is cumbersome and awkward – you have to go three or four clicks deep to get at some info that should be at the top, while some of the info at the top is secondary information.
How does one deal with that? When you do something different, which nobody understands well enough to know what they need. When you do it right, and everyone else whom they’d get the service from does only one facet, but the client does not know that there ARE multiple parts to the job. When the client feels they know all they need in one area, but where cultural or web differences mean they don’t know what they think they know.
I suppose they got what they paid for. They paid for high end features, but they did so at the expense of minimal function. Sad.
This is not the first time we’ve encountered small and micro businesses who got snookered, because they did not understand what they needed, or what the industry would provide or leave off. I am at a loss as to how to promote in a way that helps people understand this. That there is more to web design than an expensive design. That the other services which are needed WON’T be explained to them, nor will they be included from most firms. They’ll expect the business owner to KNOW that, and to hire someone else for everything else, or they’ll hope they don’t notice what is missing (sadly, this is true).
So now I am building a site for their competitors. There will be no question as to which site performs better. The little country motel that I’ll be working with will have a site that outperforms the expensive site that represents the hotel. And it will do it for half the price.
Word of Mouth “Advertising”, isn’t Advertising
Advertising and marketing are things you do to help your business grow. You plan them, execute the plan, then adjust according to results.
Word of Mouth, is not advertising, nor is it marketing. It is not something you do, and it is not something you control. It is something other people do for you – and they do it ONLY after you have done something to earn it.
Word of Mouth is VERY powerful. It is a key feature in building momentum in a business. But it isn’t a means of starting a business, and it isn’t something that happens spontaneously. It must be earned.
How do you earn it?
- By intelligent marketing and promotion. By the messages your marketing materials send. If they are friendly and if people can identify with them, they’ll remember you, and they’ll mention you when someone has a need, as in, “You might try (insert business name)”. Smart marketing generates buzz, and gets people to remember you as a possible answer to their need. This helps you, but it is not where the REAL power of word of mouth is.
- By good business practices. If they like the product, and they like the service, and you actually do what you say you will, then they’ll recommend someone else. These recommendations are based on personal experience and satisfaction. They are not just suggesting you MIGHT be the answer, they are saying you WERE their answer. That is REALLY powerful. But it does not come until you have proven yourself. And that only happens over time, so it won’t help a startup much. Somewhere about a year into things though, Word of Mouth will start to have some noticeable affect on your business if you promoted well, and if you operate your business reliably.
You can create an environment in which Word of Mouth can grow, but you cannot CREATE Word of Mouth as a marketing tactic. If you are launching a business, it will be of no value whatsoever to you until you have devised an effective promotional strategy, and carried it out for some time, and until you have a customer track record that stands behind your claims.
So start working on some effective strategies to get your business name and face out there. Get a table at events, write articles and post them for article marketing, get backlinks for your site, hand out business cards, do networking to get to know people, both online and off.
There are plenty of things that work. If you need free marketing methods (remember, they take time to do, and they are often slow to work, but they also usually have long term results), then go to http://www.effectivefreemarketing.com/ .
Promote your business. Then enjoy the feeling when it begins to work.
I Get So Tired of Saying It…
Sometimes I really am tired of telling people what a scam is, just to have them come back to me with another one to ask me if maybe (please), won’t this one work? The list of reasons I give them are the same as I gave them before. I don’t want to insult people, but sometimes I just want to scream!
The hallmarks of scams and almost scams are pretty obvious once you get familiar with them. They are things like:
1. Emotional appeals that leave off critical details.
2. “One Page Websites” that give you no background about who is selling it, or how to contact them.
3. Requirements that you leave an email address before you can find out what it is they are really talking about.
4. Financial companies located offshore (they lack financial protections you might expect to have).
5. People who claim to have the secret to wealth who have a non-professional website (using a template driven website that does not have custom graphics, using free hosting space, etc).
6. Unrealistic claims, or claims built around “imagine this” phrases.
7. Cookie cutter websites. They don’t work…. Not unless YOU work a lot first!
8. Lack of a sound product. That means, something that people want, at the price they are asking. A $2 product plus the ability to resell it does NOT equal a $35 value. A membership to a site with “thousands of downloads” is usually NOT a sound product (those same downloads are available free every Christmas). The ability to resell something is NOT a product!
There are a bunch more, and there is no way you can list everything, because someone will come up with another one just as soon as you think you got all the ways they conceal that they are going to rip you off.
Today I reviewed a financial investment scheme where the terms of use stated that you certified that you were not a law inforcement agent, nor an informant for a law enforcement agent, and that you released the company from ALL civil or criminal charges that you might feel you could file against them!
Stuff like that is a huge, screaming red flag! And it was right there, in print, for anyone to read!
If you don’t want to get scammed, read the fine print. Not only that, figure out what it MEANS, not just what they want you to think it means. “Imagine that you got up every morning to find hundreds of payment notifications in your email inbox…” is NOT saying you WILL. They just want you to IMAGINE that you could, and to THINK they are promising you will.
I keep saying it though, with the hopes that maybe it will help someone not just avoid getting scammed once, but help them spot how to never get scammed again.
And Then I Chose NOT to Blog…
I’ve been considering blogging since the concept first became a hot topic. But I know enough about it that it was not a good match for me at the time.
See, I have always struggled with consistency. I am a strong starter, but poor finisher when I do not have a client who is nudging me gently for something to be finished. I’ve finished building over 35 websites, but those were things I could build rapidly enough that I finished them before the enthusiasm ran out. Blogging is like publishing a periodical (something else I have also done) – It has to be done regularly.
And I am bad at regular. To keep a blog going you have to publish things people want, on a consistent basis. I just knew I could not do that. Not unless I had a purpose that would encompass all of who I was, so that I was not just trying to focus on one topic that I’d dry up on.
The Frumpy Haus Frau, more than any other site I own, is probably the one that gives me the greatest scope to really be me. I don’t have to be just a web designer, or just a marketing expert, or just a parenting writer. I can be all that I am, and write about the things that matter most to me at the moment that I am living.
So for the last two years, I have chosen not to blog. And here now, is the radical departure.
I often resist change. I see no need to change when what I am doing is working well, and when the change would only present a new set of problems with no clear advantage. But I also am capable of growth. And growth occurs by changing in ways that bring benefits. Blogging would not have brought a benefit before – it would have been outweighed by the problems it would have created – but now it can. So I changed.
And I started a blog…
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