Wasting your efforts on marketing

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Solid marketing can do wonderful things for your business, but it can be easy to get distracted and waste your time.

Similar to my recent post “Can you speed it up?“, people can often do things in marketing that have the opposite of the intended effect. In the book “Trying Not To Try“, the author shares a thought from Chinese philosopher Mecius:

“In the state of Song there was a man who, worried because his sprouts of grain were not growing fast enough, decided to go out to his field and pull on them. Without any idea of what he’d done, he returned home and announced to his family, ‘I am really exhausted today, I’ve been out in the fields helping the sprouts to grow!’ Alarmed, his sons rushed out to the fields to take a look and saw that all the sprouts had shriveled and died.” This episode is the basis of a modern Chinese saying, “pulling on the sprouts to help them grow,” which refers to any effort that has thoroughly counterproductive results.

In the world of marketing I see this come up in a few ways:

  • People clicking their own results in the search engine to try to rank better.
  • People buying keyword-rich domain names (like high-quality-dress-shirts.com) and redirecting them to their site to help with ranking.

Neither of those will work at all — you’re just wasting your time and money.

The worst thing I often see is people going full steam ahead without any kind of plan. They’ll be posting on Facebook 20x daily when their main audience is on LinkedIn or they’ll start spending money running Google Ads without tightening up their website first.

Those make them like the man pulling sprouts in the field. They’ll work hard and be proud of their effort, but they’ll actually be making things worse.

Do your research, develop a plan, and then make sure that all subsequent efforts are in line with what you’ve put together.

SEO hasn’t ever really changed

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If you’ve ever done work on your website to improve your search engine optimization (SEO), and you’ve done it in a legit way, the techniques really haven’t changed much over the years.

Google’s Danny Sullivan recently tweeted (via SE Roundtable) that very thing with two comments.

First, he simply said: “Our good advice then remains the same over two decades later. To succeed in Google Search, focus on people-first content.“

Second, he shared a screenshot of Google’s quality guidelines from way back in 2002:

I’ve made the argument for years that Google isn’t changing the rules on us, but they’re simply getting better at detecting and dealing with spam. If you’ve found some creative way to trick Google, they’ll likely find a way to stop it. However, if you simply generate high-quality content that is useful for people, that remains the main thing that Google wants to see.

Google has made a few small shifts over the years, adding emphasis for mobile devices and website security (both of which were irrelevant when they started in 1998), but the core is still the same — make pages for users, not search engines.

The future could be a bit cloudier, as AI is going to disrupt SEO in a few major ways (more AI-generated content, as well as AI-powered search results), but there is no need to get away from the core tenants of what Google is saying. Produce great content for humans, and you’ll do pretty well in search.

“Make it darker” is not an acceptable form of feedback

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Feedback can be a wonderful thing, as I’ve shared many times on here (like “Feedback is a gift“), but only if it’s the right kind of feedback. If someone says “I like it“, that’s not very helpful, because our clients are not the people that we build websites for. Their liking it or not is often irrelevant to the goal of the project.

In his book “The Win Without Pitching Manifesto“, author Blair Enns says it like this:

We welcome the client’s input on the strategy and in exchange we ask him to grant us the freedom to explore various ways of executing it. This means we invite him to say, “That blue isn’t bold enough to deliver on our core value of strength.” But we explain that he is not invited to say, “Make it darker.” Suggestions on this front are always welcome, but dictates are not.

Of course, that puts more work back on us, as it should — we need to be able to defend all of our strategy, content, and design decision with solid reasons for everything, and never with “it just looks better that way”.

Related is something that David Ogilvy shared in his book “Ogilvy on Advertising“:

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

This is a big part of the reason why our process can’t be sped up; we need to work through every step with the viewpoint of the end user, and that takes time.

If you want to make something darker just because you’d like it better that way, go for it, but backing those ideas with solid reasons on how the change will affect the end user will make everything much more effective.

AI won’t take over this blog

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While AI is already writing a ton of the content that you come across on the internet, that won’t ever be the case on here. That’s not because AI isn’t good enough or useful, but it goes against what I’m trying to accomplish.

Recently, Blair Enns shared the following on Twitter:

AI is only eating the jobs of those who write for SEO and other curators of facts. If you write to better understand the world and to grow, and you publish to invite others along for the ride, your job is not only safe, it’s becoming even more valuable.

As Blair says, there is a solid case to use AI to help write for SEO and other promotional types of content. It’s still imperfect and needs a human touch, but it’s coming along quickly and soon it’ll be virtually impossible to distinguish between AI and humans for most content.

That’s not to say I won’t use AI to a degree on here. I perhaps could use it to help generate ideas, but at this point I have way more ideas than I have time. However, I could see adding an AI-powered search tool to the site, similar to the one that Seth Godin uses. Seth’s is pretty neat, and he very intentionally has it show the summary using a third-party voice because he knows that it may not always be accurate.

Back to Blair’s tweet, my sole purpose here is indeed to “understand the world and to grow”, and farming the content out to AI to any meaningful degree would completely eliminate that purpose. AI will be fantastic for a lot of things, but there will be places where I intentionally avoid it in order to keep things on track.

It’s about time to remove the gates

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“Gated content” on websites has historically been a great way to build an email list. I’m sure you’ve done it — there’s a great PDF that interests you like “10 ways to prepare your lawn for the fall”, and it’s free if you just give over your email address. Generally speaking, it’s a win-win situation; you get great free content, the company offering it grows their email list a bit.

While it can still be an effective approach, the time is fading.

Sarah Threet at Heinz Marketing summed it up very well when she said:

“The supply of content is so high that there is significantly less of a need to download gated content when there is likely ungated content of equal value.”

While gating your content may get some subscribers, there’s a good chance that it’ll turn people away. You need to decide if you want to grow your list or if you want more people to read your content, because you can’t have it both ways. It’s similar to the challenge of going after pageviews or readers, which is an equally tough call to make.

It reminds me of our story of how we came to be a client of Blumer CPAs. As far as I can remember, they never offered any gated content — just free resources so that we could see what kinds of problems they can solve.

Perhaps if they had gated some content they could have gotten our info earlier and pushed harder, but there’s also a chance that the gate would have turned us away, and we’d have never grown to appreciate what they had to offer. Instead, we kept consuming all of their free content (which really was quite valuable in and of itself) and our trust for their company grew even without direct communication.

Gated content isn’t dead yet, and can work well in some circumstances, but more and more I encourage you to just give it away, show your skills, and be a leader, as that approach is likely to produce the best outcomes for you.

You are advertising to a moving parade

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Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy had many tremendous ideas when it came to advertising, but one of his big ones was to stick with what works. In his mind, companies switched from one marketing tactic to another far before the first one had run dry.

If you’re sick and tired of the ads that you’re running, that’s probably perfectly fine. You see them over and over, day after day, whereas the people you’re trying to reach aren’t seeing them nearly as often — if at all!

Ogilvy saw the audience like this:

“You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”

Let me repeat myself

I’ve tried to keep that in mind on this blog too. If you’re reading this now, thank you, but I’m going to guess that you haven’t read all 1,500 posts on here. Probably not even 500 of them. Or even 50 of them.

Often, when coming up with ideas for new posts, I’ll think “that might be good, but I wrote something similar last year“. I need to remember that likely no one remembers that one, and even if they do this new post might have a better spin on it. I’m trying to be open to repeating myself, at least to a degree.

If you find you’re getting tired of hearing me repeat myself, then I owe you a deep and sincere thank you for reading so much of my work and being in the top 1% of my readers. For the rest of you, enjoy the fresh new content every time you stop by.

Writing a summary is 100x more valuable than reading one

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I’ve recently started listening to David Senra’s “Founders” podcast, and it’s fantastic! Every week he reads a biography of someone interesting and then shares his insights from the book in a ~60 minute podcast.

While I’m enjoying listening to it, and I’ll continue to do so, I can’t help think one thing — David is getting way more out of this than I am.

Reading the entire biography is more valuable than listening a summary, for sure. Beyond that, though, David also takes the time to put together the summary, and then read it for all of us. Some of the main insights from each book he’ll probably look at five or six times by the time it’s done, and we’ll simply have heard him mention it once.

It’s kind of like the idea of visiting your notes more frequently; David is touching this content many more times than a listener like me, and he’s getting way more out of it as a result.

The Productivity Game

It’s similar to something else that a friend just shared with me called The Productivity Game. In this case, Nathan Lozeron shares book summaries in the form of PDFs, illustrations, and videos. Like David, Nathan does a fantastic job of assembling his summaries, but I’m again left feeling like Nathan is learning a ton more in building those summaries than I am in reading them.

Time…

I know what you’re thinking at this point, and you’re exactly right — to do what David or Nathan is doing takes tremendously more time. Looking at David’s work, for example, I simply can’t fit reading another book every week plus generating, editing and publishing a podcast for each one. Summaries are better than nothing.

Blinkist

I’m still a big fan of Blinkist (as I shared here back in 2020), and it’s similar to the examples given above. I read as many full books as I’m able, but there are only so many hours in a day. Tools like Founders, The Productivity Game, and Blinkist are great ways to get a wider range of insight in a limited amount of time.

Ultimately, that comes back to why I write this blog, and why I’ve added new things like the Sunday Summaries. Taking time to summarize what I’m learning is hopefully of some benefit to you, but is likely a much larger benefit to me. Everybody wins.

I’ll keep using tools like Founders and Blinkist to help cover more ground, but to the extent possible I’ll keep my focus on reading full books and then taking the time to summarize the bits of knowledge that I gain from them so I can learn even more.

Visit your notes more often, not less

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There are a lot of tools out there to help automate your note-taking. For example, a recent episode of Tech Talk Y’all shared the Omnivore app, which can automatically move highlights from your Kindle into Obsidian. It’s really slick, but I think it takes things the wrong direction for me. My notes are intended to help me learn, so I need to visit them more often, not less.

Here are two examples.

First, you may have noticed my recent “Sunday Summary” posts. While I hope you gain some value from them, I make it clear in the posts that those summaries are largely for me. They force to revisit my posts again and hopefully make things stick a little longer in my brain.

I also have tools like the Readwise “Daily Review” that forces me to revisit past highlights. I want to see old notes come up again, and do the manual work to connect them to one another. Heck, this goes back to a post from a few years ago about why I’m blogging every day.

Why do you have notes?

Granted, your need for notes might be different. It’s very possible that you literally want to just have a database of thoughts that you can reference later. In that case, tools like Omnivore are probably amazing for you, because it can automate dumping more stuff in your notes for future use.

It all comes down to why you have a place for notes at all. Once you understand that, you can shape your activities to make sure you’re doing things to support your overall goals.

For me, I want my notes to be a place that is constantly evolving to grow more benefits, so visiting those notes more often is the best way to do that.

The clarity of an idea is based on the person receiving it

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When sharing ideas and strategies with others, I try to be very clear. This takes two forms:

First, it’s not magic. It irritates me when people tell me they have someone “doing SEO” for their site, but they have no idea what they’re doing. We strive to be clear and transparent with what we do, because none of it is magic.

Second, and where I struggle more, is being clear from the perspective of the person listening to me. In the world of marketing, I see two common examples.

Responsive Design

Most websites these days are “responsive” meaning they adapt to all screen resolutions (from desktop to phone) smoothly. Simply saying “responsive” can make it sound more like it loads quickly, or has something to do with speed. I always try to say “mobile responsive” to make sure I’m clear about this.

Messaging

This one I’m more guilty of doing. We’re big believers in always undergoing a solid messaging strategy before we begin any project, as it makes the result far better. I often shorten that to just “messaging” and will say things like “we’ll start with messaging”. That’s not always clear.

Just last week I was talking to a potential client and I mentioned “messaging” and their response was “oh, like texting?”. That’s not at all what I meant, but I could absolutely see why they thought that.

In her book Radical Candor, author Kim Scott puts it this way:

“The essence of making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea but also of the person to whom one is explaining the idea.”

If something I say isn’t understood clearly by the other person, it’s 100% my fault and something I need to resolve. Fixing it in the moment is fine, like I did with the messaging example above, but proactively being cautious about avoiding shorthand jargon is always a better way to go.

If you finish your to-do list, that’s problematic

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As a guy that prides himself on productivity, I’ll admit that the title of this post is really weird. As I dug in, though, the concept has slowly made more sense to me.

This comes from a recent episode of the Cortex podcast, where CGP got into this a good bit. It started as a discussion about prioritizing your to-do list, where he suggested you should simply consider:

“What is the order of the next 2-5 things that need to happen?”

Fair enough, sort your list. As he talked further, though, he explained that choosing those “next 2-5 things” means that some items will get pushed toward the bottom and may never get completed — and that’s ok too.

He explains further:

“You’re doing life wrong if you’re consistently getting to the bottom of your to-do list. If your to-do list is empty, you’re not reaching hard enough or you’re just not thinking about the scope of things that you can actually do.”

If your to-do list is longer than you can ever do, that means you can pick the most impactful items to work on and accomplish more than someone that finishes up a short, tidy list.

I see that somewhat like this blog, where my list of potential ideas is outpacing my ability to write about all of them. Right now I have 10 posts ready to go, but 35 more ideas (and growing!) on my list, with a few going back to last year.

This is a good thing! In the case of this blog, it allows me to choose items that I really want to unpack, versus picking something less meaningful because I’m running out of ideas.

A huge to-do list?

In terms of the to-do list, I should clarify that these shouldn’t all be on a single list that you need to sort through every day. If you have tons of items that you want to get done, and they’re all on one list in front of you, that would be overwhelming. Any decent to-do software will let you tuck items away using folders or tags, and you simply need to revisit them periodically to see which ones need to be moved up to the priority list.

I still argue that your inbox and other daily systems should be frequently worked to zero in order to properly set your goals for the day, but a to-do that extends beyond your lifetime isn’t a bad thing at all.

I encourage you to check out the full Cortex episode to hear more. It’s a very long episode, and this section starts around the 1:02:40 mark if you want to just jump in there.