Do you enjoy reading mission statements?
How about “welcome to our website” messages? Photos of jigsaw puzzles and handshakes?
No?
That’s weird, because if we’re to learn from the examples set by our small business peers, this stuff is the friggin cat’s pajamas. Why would anybody do this stuff if nobody wanted to see it?
Because they suck, that’s why. And if you don’t want to suck too, here are ten things you probably shouldn’t do on your website.
Like most starters you probably don’t “check out” for the weekend (at least not entirely).
Most of us put some work in on Saturdays and Sundays. Since much of the business world quiets down, the weekends can be a haven to get some real work done without much disruption.
Why not take some time this weekend to make next week a little better?
Here are ten ideas to get you started:
When Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers that becoming a master takes 10,000 hours of practice, he was probably trying to give us some hope – that success is more about your work ethic and persistence than being born lucky.
But most of us see that number, with all those zeros, and think to ourselves, “shit…that’s a long time.”
And it is a long time. If you practiced your thing three hours per day, seven days a week without fail it’d still take you 9 years before you’d be a master by this standard.
The hope of telling people it just takes “hard work and time” is that we’ll shed our fixed mindset – you know, that voice in our head that tells us we’re just plain bad at writing, we can’t design worth a damn and we couldn’t sell a bucket of water to a man on fire because we’re just not wired that way.
Local businesses don’t usually have the budget to hire a marketing firm to launch a promotional campaign.
Usually you’re duct taping things together, rubbing in some elbow grease and hitting the “good enough” button.
But there are plenty of ways to leverage the web to promote your local business – and most of them are more about investing your time than opening your wallet.
Here are 21 things you can start on today that will increase your traffic and market your business online.
Competitors suck. Especially when they’re doing better than you are.
And when you’re getting your ass kicked and decide to step up your game - get better search rankings, grow your audience, land more sales, etc – the first place you look for ideas is at your competitors.
What are they doing? What’s working for them? How are they getting attention? How, exactly, did they get such a big slice of pie?
So you start spying…