Why do I care if your company is 50 years old?

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Why do I care if your company is 50 years old? I don’t, really. At least not yet. Yet many websites continue to lead with something like that at the front of their site.

When a users visits your site for the first time, they don’t care about you — they just want to know how you can help them. That’s it. Ideally, your site will tell them three things, very quickly and clearly:

  1. What problem they’re having (that you’ve likely gone through yourself)
  2. How you can make things better
  3. What their life will look like after working with you

As I shared before, don’t propose on the first date. Let people understand what you can do to make their life better, and then they’ll be more likely to want to know more about you.

In fact, once a potential customer can understand how you might be able to solve their problem, then telling them that you’ve been around for 50 years (with the benefits that go with it — experience, processes, etc) can be quite valuable.

Who are you?

Looking at the data for the GreenMellen site for the past five years, the page about our team is the 18th most popular page that people first arrive to our site on. The home page is first, and various other pages and blog posts (generally ones that rank well in Google) come after it.

However, in terms of total views on the site, our about page is third! This means that people don’t land immediately on that page, but arrive on a page that speaks more directly to them. Then, once they think that we might be a good fit, they head over to read more about how we work.

If you look at your website stats (we can help you unpack them if you’re not sure how), you’ll likely see very similar results.

Take the stuff about you off of your home page. It’s not about you — it’s about your clients. Focus on how you can serve them, and they’ll come learn more about you when they’re ready.

Who do you trust?

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I was at a business event last year (pre-COVID) and an interesting thing happened. A few of us were chatting, when a woman came up to us with a great idea: “Let’s pass our business cards around, take photos of them, and share them on our social media accounts!“

While I’m happy to recommend businesses that I trust, I didn’t really know these people very well and couldn’t vouch for them yet. Beyond that, randomly posting a business card on Facebook with no context seemed really weird.

Here’s a random business card

This particular person continues to do that, and my trust of her recommendations is now roughly zero. I love her heart behind the idea, trying to help businesses promote one another, but the execution isn’t there. Without the trust factor, the recommendations are meaningless.

I trust Big Peach Running Company because of their return policy. I trust Liberty Mutual because I have a human there that I can rely on. I trust Carter’s Automotive and Snodental because they don’t try to upsell unnecessary things for my cars or my teeth.

Helping to promote local businesses is a great thing to do, but doing it in a way that erodes the trust that others see in you is generally a bad way to go about it.

We have to do something about it

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Over the past few weeks, the stock market has been in a bit of a frenzy over the mess with GameStop. If you’re not familiar with what’s been going on, this is a good overview.

The problem I’m seeing is a lot of people suggesting “we need to do something“. While perhaps things need to change, quickly making some kind of change could backfire in unexpected ways.

FOSTA-SESTA

It’s similar to the FOSTA-SESTA legislation passed a few years ago to help fight sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is one of those things that “we need to do something” about, so our leaders did “something”. While that legislation indeed removed sex work from some semi-popular websites, it essentially just moved it further underground and has caused a huge uptick in murders.

Techdirt summed it up well in this article, including:

Within one month of FOSTA’s enactment, thirteen sex workers were reported missing, and two were dead from suicide. Sex workers operating independently faced a tremendous and immediate uptick in unwanted solicitation from individuals offering or demanding to traffic them. Numerous others were raped, assaulted, and rendered homeless or unable to feed their children. These egregious acts of violence and economic devastation are directly attributable to FOSTA’s enactment.

So what to do about GameStop?

I don’t have the answer to fix the GameStop situations, but two things come to mind:

  1. It may not need to be fixed. A big reason this happened is because a hedge fund got greedy, so this may just be a great lesson for all of them.
  2. An initial reaction was to take down some of the forums where people gathered to inspire one another to make these purchases and push stock prices higher.

Removing the ability for people to communicate about these things on platforms like Facebook and Reddit may help short-term, but would be awful long term. People won’t stop talking about it; they’ll just move to deeper sites where they’re harder to follow.

It’s like with the FOSTA-SESTA fallout, where police are lamenting that it’s much harder to catch pimps and traffickers now because those conversations have moved to darker corners of the internet.

Backpage was one of the popular sites for those illicit activities, but police were able to use it to catch predators. Now they can’t. Sgt. John Daggy:

“We’ve been a little bit blinded lately because they shut Backpage down. I get the reasoning behind it, and the ethics behind it, however, it has blinded us. We used to look at Backpage as a trap for human traffickers and pimps.”

There may be a good solution to solving the GameStop mess, or maybe there isn’t. Either way, a quick reaction will almost certainly only serve to make things worse.

What record label is Taylor Swift on?

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What label is Taylor Swift on? It doesn’t matter.

It matters to the record label, and it might matter to Taylor, but it doesn’t matter to you or I. We just care whether we can access her on Spotify or YouTube Music or wherever we try to stream.

What network produced “The Office”? All most people know is that it’s no longer on Netflix and they have to go to Peacock to watch it now. Some people know that it was NBC, but that’s mostly irrelevant anymore.

Who published Harry Potter? This one is even tougher, as I would guess that very few people know (or care) that it was Scholastic Press.

At the end of the day, none of those matter except to the people that created them, and they need to learn to be ok with that.

This site is built on WordPress and hosted by Flywheel. I think both are excellent choices for people to use, but they don’t matter to you. You want to see great content (which I hope you sometimes get), and it’s irrelevant what CMS and hosting I’m using.

Produce great work, and let that work speak for itself.

Reading for the altMBA

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I’m taking part in Seth Godin’s latest class of the altMBA next month, and the books for the session just arrived at my house. These aren’t textbooks or anything — just normal books you can get on Amazon. Some have been on my “to read” list, and some weren’t, but they’ll all be getting read in the next few weeks.

If you’re curious what they are, here’s the list:

Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. While none of the books are strict requirements before we start, they strongly encourage people to read this one first, as a main piece of the altMBA is giving and receiving feedback with your cohort.

Inclusive Conversations by Mary-Frances Winters.

Overcoming Bias by Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman.

buy super-kamagra online buy super-kamagra online

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

I’m excited to dig into them, and I suspect some of what I learn from them will show up on this blog in the coming months. If you’re looking for something new to read, those are five good places you could start!

The new WordPress.com site building service

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A few weeks ago, WordPress.com (not to be confused with the free downloadable software at WordPress.org) announced that they were going to be offering a site building service. This has concerned a lot of folks in the industry (“they’re going to steal our business”), but I think the concern is overblown. In fact, this is likely a good thing.

First, most of our clients won’t know or care about it. When someone comes to GreenMellen for a site, they very rarely come with WordPress in mind. We educate them on why it’s likely their best decision, but few were searching for “companies that build WordPress sites”. They want a company to build a site to meet their goals, and WordPress is simply a way we choose to get it done.

Next, building a site is getting easier while messaging is becoming more vital. Over the past few years, various visual editing tools have made creating a basic site easier and easier. I suspect the coming years will continue in that direction. Having someone else that can build a site is great, but it’s the messaging (and likely things like keyword research as well) that really make it work, and WordPress.com will have a tough time scaling that.

Finally, WordPress currently powers roughly 40% of the entire internet, or likely some 400,000,000 sites. If WordPress.com did an amazing job and could build a million sites a year (which seems incredibly unlikely), that means they’d take away 0.25% of the market.

All of that said, it’s an interesting development to unpack. My friends Robert Jacobi and Chris Lema both have written great takes on this, so I encourage you to check out their thoughts.

Monologue vs Dialogue

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Is your marketing more monologue or an actual dialogue?

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of monologue — buy a TV or radio ad, spread the message, and see what happens. Increasingly, though, customers are wanting more of a dialogue with the companies they do business with, and it’s important not to confuse the two.

The latest bullhorn

Nearly a decade ago, I did some tests with churches and car dealers to see how they were using Twitter. They all advertised their use of Twitter on their home pages, but how did they really use it? In most cases, it was simply a new bullhorn — they tweeted out news and info, but did absolutely no listening or replying. Many companies are still doing the same thing today.

Most of the current technology allows you to interact with those you wish to serve, and it’s up to you to choose to engage with them or not.

If your product is great, price is only a tie-breaker

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I’m a big fan of the 2Bobs podcast, and an episode of theirs from a few years ago (“Truths and Myths About Money“) crept back into my mind recently. In that episode, Blair Enns said two very important things about pricing your product or service.

Price is ideally only a tie-breaker

When you find the right client that needs what you have, price is really only a tie-breaker. They want the right company/product to do the job, and you have what they need to get the job done.

If you can stand out with the right solutions, integrity, chemistry and everything that someone needs, price really only comes into play if someone else can match you on all of those items. It can happen, certainly, so fair pricing is always important.

That leads to the second big insight from that episode…

If you’re losing business on price it’s not because you’re not cheap enough, it’s because you’re not good enough

If a potential leads goes to one of your competitors instead of you “because they were cheaper”, that’s not likely the actual reason. It’s really because that person saw you and your competitor as roughly equal, and then price became that tie-breaker.

Blair sums it up nicely with this:

You’re down there competing on price, right? If you’re competing on price, it’s because … the client thinks he can get just as good quality somewhere else for less money. So instead of focusing on cutting your price, focus on raising the quality of your offering.

Always be looking for ways to make yourself stand out among the competition, but also be constantly leveling up so you have the skills and innovation to make people proud to hire you.

As Seth Godin is fond of saying: “The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win.“

Good salespeople have good return policies behind them

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My wife just picked up a new pair of running shoes from Big Peach Running Co recently, and she commented how the salespeople there are always so helpful and never put pressure to buy. Without really thinking, I said “Yep, it’s because they have such a good return policy.“

After taking a few minutes to think through it, it seems to stand up.

Electronics Boutique

Back in the 90’s I worked at Electronics Boutique, a video game store now under the GameStop brand. At the time, they had an amazingly good return policy where you could get a full refund on any game within 10 days for any reason.

Don’t like the game? Return it.

Loved the game but you already beat it? Return it.

It was awesome!

Of course, people eventually abused the system and it was changed, but for the years that it was in place it was amazing for everyone.

For us in sales, it took the pressure off. We could suggest a game and let them know about the return policy, and our perceived level of trust went up 10x. Returns are kind of a pain to process, so why would we sell them garbage knowing we’d have to clean it up later?

For the customer, it made buying easier. They could try a game, see if they liked it, and then return if they didn’t. There was no pressure to choose the perfect game, and no feeling let down if it turned out to be a dud.

Create clear honesty when it’s hard to prove

In both cases, the stores are able to increase their perceived level of honesty with just a few words, because it’s easy to hold them to it.

It’s important to work to build honesty in the long-run, but a generous return policy is usually the sign of a company you can trust.

Bonus: Why the Electronics Boutique return policy really went away

You can say “just ban the people that abuse it”, and we did, but people figured out a perfect way to beat the system that was impossible to stop.

Say you owned “Mortal Kombat” for a year and got tired of it. You could get a new game, for free, with just a few simple steps.

  1. Go to Electronics Boutique and buy a new copy of Mortal Kombat, still in the shrink wrap.
  2. Go to Best Buy and exchange the “new” unopened game (“I got it as a gift”) for the other new game that you really want.
  3. Go to Electronics Boutique with your year-old Mortal Kombat and your receipt from a few days ago and get a full refund on your “new” purchase.
  4. Untrackable, unstoppable.

It was brilliant for all of the wrong reasons. I hate when people ruin good things like that.