If You Build It, They Won’t Come
First of all, in a delightful homage to something — irony, maybe? — I’d like to let you know that according to Alexa, this website gets no traffic. Nope, not even from you. (Alexa is a website traffic ranking website that compares your traffic to other sites.) Back when this site was getting 15,000 hits a week, it was about the 60,000th most popular site on the internet.
Now that it’s getting 100,000 hits a week, it is the 357,930th most popular site on the internet. Isn’t that nice? I think that’s nice.
Thank you, Alexa, for being slightly more unreliable than the Bush administration.
The lesson here is to not even think about your Alexa ranking unless it is getting better. If it is getting better, obsess over it and use it as proof that you are, in fact, the next Michael Arrington.
Moving on.
In the creation of that course that took 12 years off my life, I came up with a few pieces of advice that didn’t really fit anywhere in the course. Either they couldn’t really go in anywhere or they were so widespread in their applicability that I’d have to repeat it a hundred times throughout the thing. So if I think any of it is relevant to you guys, I’ll just put it here.
If you run a service business — and in service I include coaching and consulting — and to a degree if you run any other kind of business, here’s the best piece of advice I’ve got.
Spend 4 times more time on MARKETING than you do on DOING.
I could give you the list and litany of people who are the worst at this, but basically everybody is the worst at this. Except maybe life coaches. They’re the REAL worst.
You bust your ass creating this wonderful business that is going to change lives. You get the certification and you spend the money on the website and you give the free sessions to get the testimonials. You create something that will quite honestly make it so people will not even remember what their life was like before they worked with you. And then what do you do?
You sit around and wait for people to find you.
Unless any of the other aspects of your business are absolutely tragic, you should not be spending your work time:
- tweaking your website
- responding to comments
- reorganizing your accounting methods
- taking skills upgrade courses, including mine
- reading ebooks
- chatting on IM
- telling people what you ate for breakfast on Twitter
There is nothing wrong with any of the above activities, but those are the things to do in your SPARE time. And if you’re not getting clients right now, you don’t have spare time during the workday. The time that you THINK is spare should be spent getting your fucking name out there, all over the place.
If you are not getting enough clients, your only priority is getting clients.
That is all. Now stop reading blogs and get back to work.