I recently had a client of many years leave to have his site hosted and maintained by a marketing firm (why a marketing firm would be hosting websites is a topic for another blog…). Now we hosted his website and gave his company excellent support completing all support requests within the same day for years. He never waited even 24 hours for us to answer and complete requests. You can’t give better support than this. This is why RooSites is the top website management company in the US, Bar NONE.
But this client has the condition (and the title of this blog) that he listens to the last person he speaks to, no matter how poor the advice given. He is open to suggestion, and fast talkers sway him quite easily. So he is ripe to be taken advantage by unscrupulous vendors he meets at various networking events and spammers shooting arrows in the sky looking for the one sucker.
As an example, previously he had an SEO salesman sell him a bill of goods. The advice was so elementary and wouldn’t improve much. You know they type, they run a free report and tell you how they can fix it and make you #1 for everything under the sun. (charging you an arm and a leg and delivering NOTHING substantial) We had done a lot of good for this company, so I wouldn’t fight over some minor tweaks and it was easier just to make the changes (at least in this case they weren’t black hat tricks that would hurt his rankings).
Personally, I figure it is better to do right by people, as in the long run you has much better, longer term relationships with your clientele. We have a 98% retention rate, which says we are correct in this assumption.
Several months ago this client told me about this marketing firm who’s going to do some work for his company. Looking up their work, I didn’t see anything too impressive, and although he lives in a major market this company was not one of the better firms and had a lackluster portfolio at best. But, I figured that if he liked their work, perhaps they could help him as he was not very skilled at writing blogs and coming up with ideas for content.
But, as I said, he listens to the last person he speaks to, so he typically makes bad decisions rather than trusting those companies who were fair to him for many years.
Alas, there is a cure for this condition if you suffer from this affliction.
Next time some fast talking salesman approaches you and proposes a change to your website management:
Taking these 3 simple steps will save you agita down the road and money!! Having a company you can trust with no hidden agenda is worth its weight in gold in today’s world.
There is an strategy attorneys universally follow: Do not ask a question you don’t know the answer to. This is so the attorney isn’t blindsided and actually asks a question which will harm his or her case.
This is good advice, but you’re probably wondering what is a web guy doing speaking about strategy for attorneys?
Good question.
This actually came to me while perusing my email. I receive a weekly email from a popular review site which will remain nameless. They send you an email recapping your past week’s activities. It tells you how many people viewed your profile, and other pertinent data. This made me think of that strategy that attorneys use, as this email actually hurts their businesses and the chances of me spending hard earned money to advertise with them get slimmer each week.
Why?
I will help to tell you. Why would I ever advertise with a company who is telling me nobody views my profile and I get no leads? It’s almost like a reverse IQ test. If I advertise with them, I am probably a moron or want to throw money down the drain. So what I’m saying to you is: Before you put out any content on the web for social media, Ask yourself: Will this help or hurt my business? In my example, they are sending emails to countless thousands telling the recipient that no one looks at your profile on their site.
Now that doesn’t mean that everything you put out there is going to equal instant income. No, in fact much of what we put out our social media is to portray ourselves in a positive light. I like to say that anything that shows me as a subject matter expert is a good thing and will benefit my business in the long run.
It is almost like there should be a Hippocratic oath for web developers & website managers. First do no harm. This is great advice for any industry, though of course the damage I can do with content or social media is not quite what the Hippocrates was speaking of…
Bottom line:
When you’re putting things out on the web, remember these things are there forever. How many times have you seen somebody put something out there that truly harms their career/business. They rush in and delete the post, but it’s out there forever. Someone has already created a screen shot and/or shared with their friends. So before you post anything ask yourself the question: Will this help and can it hurt?
