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Nothing ventured, nothing gainedOctober 6th, 2017

This expression is as true today as it was when it was first uttered by Benjamin Franklin.

I thought of this expression when I received an email recently. It was from a client who I’ve had for several years. They were a bit disillusioned as their web store wasn’t getting any orders recently.

I originally met with them and we came up with a game plan which I felt would give them a very good chance to succeed with their web store.

  I told them they needed to do the following:

1. New products:  I advised that they will need to constantly be adding new products and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Not everything sells online. So if your products are not selling, try something else. They seemed to understand and said they would constantly send new products and evaluate their current product line.
2. Social media: we all agreed that one way they could drive people to their site to purchase products would be by constantly posting to Facebook. I recommended 3 to 5 posts a week, and they agreed.
3. Blogging: these guys live in a vacation area that a lot of people love. It is a perfect thing to blog about, their neighborhood, their product line, and so much more content right in front of them. They promised to send me a blog post at least 2 to 4 times a month.
4. AdWords: one way to get your product line out there is to advertise. As they have a narrowly focused business, an adwords campaign would be a very inexpensive way to advertise their business nationwide. They were going to set up an ad words account and I would help them get it going and monitor.

Well, fast forward years later they never said did anything they said that they would do above. Now, I understand sometimes people busy with other things and don’t have time to spend on their websites. This is why they hire us, but we do need the participation of clients. They need to send us the products to add, blog posts (or at least subjects, we can write posts) and items to post to social media. Now of course we kept up their e-commerce software, all their plug-ins and everything else, we held up our end of the bargain.

I feel bad when a client doesn’t succeed, but it does bother me when people in business don’t even spend a minuscule amount of time. It is the whoa is me mentality. Someone doesn’t want to work hard yet they want to succeed. Let me tell you, this doesn’t work for any business on the planet.

Bottom Line: Hire a good firm to manage your website. Then put the time in and work to see your website succeeds. Treat web tasks as must do’s, not optional.

Nothing Ventured, nothing gained.