Recently a client told me that he would stop hunting clicks with articles that might get eyeballs but wouldn’t help his bottom line.
This was music to my ears. I have a very long (and complicated) relationship with this client and had attempted to get him to stop writing “click bait” off and on for longer than I can remember.
Click bait is, if you don’t know, anything that people have to click on. You’ve clicked on it yourself. We all have. For businesses it’s a waste of money.
A little while later, he sent me something he wanted help with. It was an update of an article that had nothing to do with the services the company provides.
More importantly, it had already been written a few years ago, and had been a big success for his website. (If you define success for click bait as “lots of people read it.”)
All he had done was pay someone to rewrite it.
Now, the article has a tangential relationship to the business – it’s extremely likely that the people reading this particular article have, at one point in their lives, needed the services he provides. But they may not need them today. And, like so much of the click bait this company has produced, it didn’t have a clear Call to Action to move these people into the buyer funnel.
When I asked him why he had commissioned this article, I didn’t get much of an answer. I got a rationalization.
This new version of this article will not hurt his website. It’s arguably better than the original and may bring more visitors to the website. It will not actively hurt his business. But will it drive sales? No, it likely won’t.
It might help some people know the name of his business. It might even help some people like or even trust the name of his business. But it’s tangential enough that most people reading it may not realize what the business does.
Why am I telling you about this?
Because we had a plan to create content that would help potential clients know, like and trust this business. But he’s spending money on stuff that likely doesn’t help that.
It’s important to stick to the plan. (Massive caveat: the plan needs to be decent, if not good.)
Whether you try content marketing, SEO, social media, pay-per-click ads or some mysterious new strategy you’ve read about on the internet, it’s important to
- be consistent with your strategy, to ensure that everything you do fits this strategy
- give it enough time to succeed.
Unless you’re paying for ads, internet marketing takes time.
And internet marketing doesn’t work if you keep changing your tactics or strategy every few weeks because you’re unhappy with the results.
So keep at it. (Unless of course, you’re worried you have a bad strategy, and then we should probably talk.)