Marc's Blog

Content Writing and Marketing Services

Numbers Are Overrated

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Someone has 100,000 followers. Are they real, fake, or inactive? How likely are they to even buy one of your products or at least retweet something you tweeted?

Someone’s YouTube video has 1,000,000 views. What did you get out of those views and exposure, and were those views paid for?

Someone’s Facebook post got 50,000 likes. Are those people just liking a lot of posts, were those likes paid for, and did getting all of those likes and exposure benefit your business (more sales, more followers, etc)?

Someone’s blog post got shared 5,000 times. Who shared the blog post? Someone with 10,000 followers or 10 followers?

Someone got 10,000 visitors on their blog today. Did the traffic come from a third party site?

Someone has 5,000 blog posts. Were they all actually good or were there some one-liners that didn’t make any sense? Were there any long blog posts that didn’t make any sense?

The numbers are overrated, but many people don’t see it that way. These people are focusing on spending their money and resources on temporary solutions to simply boost numbers. These people don’t spend their money and resources on things that can actually benefit their businesses. Are you spending your money and resources on your business the right way?

Why Writing Will Survive Past The 21st Century

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There are many changes happening all around us. Typing is one of them, but it won’t eliminate the need for writing. For most people, it takes less time to type a sentence than it takes to actually write one. Typing is an easier process which allows more content to be added to a blog post or article in a faster amount of time.
However, it’s easier to make errors while typing. We’ve all had that moment when we type too fast, spell something wrong, and then hit the backspace button and start over again.

Writing is different. When you write, it takes more time, but you’re almost always going to spell the words correctly if you write them. After many years of practice, writing has become natural for us. Writing allows us to think of more ideas as well. In addition to that, writing your goals is much different from typing them into a document where they risk getting lost later.

There are many things that are going to change in the next couple of years. However, writing will remain the way it is even in the 22nd century. Some old traits never go away, but not all of them are worth keeping. Writing (with the pen and paper), however, is worth keeping.

 

A Forced Leap

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Going from middle school to high school is a forced leap. It’s mandatory, and you have no choice. The legal age to stop attending classes in the U.S. is 16 years although I don’t recommend stopping.

There aren’t many forced leaps. School is one of the few things I can think of where you have absolutely no choice. You have to take the leap.

There are few forced leaps, but you will know what they are when you encounter them. However, these forced leaps must make you more willing to take your own leaps. Practicing for a team is a forced leap. On your off days, are you going to take the leap?

Forced leaps don’t happen a lot. Voluntary leaps happen many times for some people and few times for other people. The more leaps you take, the more you will learn. If you took the leap wrong, you’ll learn from your mistake. Then, you’ll be able to eventually take that leap successfully.

You have to be willing to take risks in order to move forward in the business world. If it scares you, it’s worth taking the leap.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

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You can dream big. You can think of all of the big things your business will become. However, when you meet with your audience, it’s better to have a smaller audience to begin. The smaller audience will allow you to see more clearly who your best clients are.

Having a big audience is great, but there are a lot of people who want to meet you. You may see thousands of people, and remembering them gets difficult. If your potential top clients see you first, and then you see thousands of other people, you might forget who your potential top clients were.

Coming up with a lot of content for a blog post is great. However, the blog post won’t attract a lot of readers if it’s as long as a book. I could go on about this topic, but I avoid writing thousands of words for a single blog post. Sometimes I don’t even need 10 sentences to convey my message. It’s more important to actually convey the message than to write a humongous blog post.

And so everyone understands why bigger isn’t always better, we can use an iPhone as the example. Would you rather have a 4 inch iPhone or a 20 inch iPhone? The 4 inch iPhone fits in your pocket while the 20 inch iPhone doesn’t. Playing games and using apps on the 20 inch iPhone wouldn’t be that much fun either.

Dreaming big is way better than dreaming small, but not all things are better when they are big versus when they are small.

Interests Change

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And along with those changes of interests, marketing is changed as well. 5 years later, marketing will be different. 5 years ago, marketing was different. Some changes are dramatic while others are minor. Companies and big name industries are spending millions of dollars on marketing campaigns that don’t work the way they used to.

Other than Super Bowl commercials, TV advertising isn’t as effective as it used to be. Getting your own following on social networks, products, and a blog is the way to market nowadays (although that can change too).

Marketing etiquette is inconsistent because interests change. Commercials might have been really cool to look at when someone watched TV for the first time. In the 1950’s, commercials must have been really cool since the television wasn’t that old. Now mobile advertising is the way to go although I doubt mobile advertising will be the way to go forever.

Interests change, and when those interests change, the rules of marketing change. By paying attention to those changes, you will be able to see the rules of marketing change before everyone else.

 

The Curse Of Perfectionism

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Facebook isn’t perfect. A hacker posted an update on Mark Zuckerberg’s timeline awhile ago. 

Twitter isn’t perfect. Burger King got hacked. So did Donald Trump’s account and others as well.

Blogs aren’t perfect. You can’t please everyone’s interests with a single blog.

Big chain stores aren’t perfect. The CEO of Walmart can’t visit every Walmart store in existence to see how everyone is doing.

Google isn’t perfect. Contacting them directly is like an odyssey that begins with a Google search (go figure).

Apple isn’t perfect. People have claimed that their iPhones suddenly overheated and melted.

None of us are perfect. We all have our faults.

Don’t try to be perfect. It’s impossible. Don’t continue working on a product until it is perfect in every way because you’ll never create a perfect product. I’ll never create a perfect product either. It’s not that you or I can’t come up with a good product. Something that you may think is perfect probably won’t get as much appreciation from some of your friends. Don’t focus on launching something that is perfect. Focus on actually launching something.

Don’t try to make it perfect because it won’t work.