ONLINE MARKETING IS A LABOR OF LOVE

This brief post came as a result of a conversation with a client. She was frustrated by the amount of work she was having to put into her online marketing, feeling that is was an effort with an uncertain reward...

...and of course it is! Last time I checked, there were no guarantees that just because you built a website it was going to be visited by the masses. No one promised that anyone was going read your blog, reply to a tweet or "like" you Facebook.

Whether you're online for pleasure or business (or both), nothing is certain. There are ways to help improve the potential audience, and by extrapolation potential market, but don't assume if you build it they will come.

This is why I repeatedly tell clients that online marketing, whether with your site, social media, a blog, emails...however you do it, has to be a labor of love. If you don't feel passionate about something then why the heck should anyone else?

You started "following" people on Twitter but they didn't all seem to follow you back. No one seems to retweet your posts either...and sheesh, no one commented on that blog post. It was all good stuff; useful information. Why doesn't anyone care?

You have to find your online voice and message. Call it a "personality", but your online "self" is the person you are in cyberspace. That person may be just like you in real life, or very different. Yet that person has to have a voice, and a message. If you have no voice, no one will hear you and if you have no message, you have nothing to say. Think, for a moment, about all the crap you see in an average day online...how much of it is really useful or meaninful?

In my opinion, your message needs to be something that means something to you. You can't always be clever. You're not always going to have success, but if you care about what you're "speaking" about, if it's a labor of love, it will grow.

It's a bit like gardening. You till the earth (set up your Facebook, website, blog etc) and you plant the seeds (start developing content). You nurture (follow others, leave feedback, interact), weed (unfollow, remove excess or irrelevant content) and harvest. It's a rare gardener who doesn't have some casualties along the way, but one hopes, in the end, that is was worth it.

If it seems too much like work, then perhaps you should ask yourself if this is something you should be considering and, by extrapolation, ask yourself if any of this is really what you wanted to do in the first place. Better to find out now...

We gave my client an online "makeover". She found her niche and passion and her online presence is growing like you wouldn't believe!