Sounds easy, right? WRONG. You are a busy professional, and you just can’t seem to find the time to write.
I regularly hear the following from my clients:
Now I understand, setting aside time is hard. So that is why I am giving you an easy tip that will help. Send yourself a recurring meeting invite. Then it will appear on your calendar each week. (or how often you want to post) This will force you treat writing content as a part of your normal schedule. You will get in the habit. As an example, I attend a networking meeting each week on Wednesdays. I am a member of BNI. Each week we all do a 50 second speech. As I know I need to have something to talk about, I set aside time every Tuesday. I write my blog and from that I paraphrase into my 50 second.
As easy as WordPress is, you still have to log in and post. Since we specialize in website maintenance, we typically receive posts from clients and we do the rest. We are happy to, and we know in the long run our clients succeed and perform better in searches. If you don’t have anyone to help you post, or if you have no blog or way to publish content, contact me, I am happy to help.
Sounds strange right? As a web development firm you would think our goal would always be to build clients brand-new state-of-the-art websites. But, as our goal is to manage people’s sites for the long-term, our advice tends to be different from a firm that does a one-off design project. For them, it is create and move on. For me, it is create, and manage. In business I have always tried to follow the advice of Mark Twain: “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest”.
In the particular case which spurred this post, I started managing a website about a year ago for new business. The site hadn’t been designed that long before we took over the day to day management, though it left a lot to be desired. Still, as it was a start up business, they didn’t have bags of money to spend, and certainly did not want to build a brand-new site at that point. So we looked at what the site was missing, added some new features, cleaned up some errors and made it a very usable site. We then spent time to improve the sites performance in searches. We got the website to the point where it was doing very well for queries not only in the town the business is located, but in surrounding towns as well.
Then, as it is an appointment driven business, we added a request an appointment form. Now in this day and age forms don’t tend to be all that successful as people are leery about spam, etc. But, from this particular form, they got about 15 to 20 new appointment requests within the first few months. Quite an accomplishment!
But then something interesting happened. A patient told my client that his site look a little out of date. At this point he came to me and asked me should we build a new site? Now, this is where I had to say no, if I were you I would not spend the money at this point. As a small businessman, perhaps this wasn’t my best move. But as I have said, I’m in it for the long-term, and clients truly appreciate our integrity, and the fact that we always try to do the right thing. In the long run, this type of service has led to our tremendous growth, many customer referrals, and yes in the long run more money.
