LeShun Arrington Blog

THE DIFFERENCE

The best place to start is with the broader overview and from there we can hone in on more granular detail. In other words, I’m going to give you the big picture, so that you know your objective and you know the overall strategy. We’ll then be able to deconstruct the end point we’re looking for to see how we get there.

Okay, so I mentioned earlier that this BOOK would give you an 'edge’ seeing as most people go about building their audience the wrong way. I absolutely meant that – it was not just marketing talk.

The point is that most new brands have a completely misguided approach to how they go about marketing and promoting themselves and this mistake absolutely cripples any chance of success. That’s what we’ll be addressing here though and in doing so, we’ll hopefully be able to ensure that you don’t take a similarly misguided approach.

How So Many Get it So Wrong

So how do so many businesses get it wrong? What is so incorrect about their approach?

The problem comes down to care and attention. That is to say that to put it politely, a lot of businesses view their digital marketing efforts as a ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Think of all the different marketers that you have encountered on your trips around the web. How many of them do you feel are trustworthy and offering a great product? How many do you feel are just trying to get you to spend cash on a sub-par product?

How many times have you had a web page pop up without your intention and tell you about this fantastic opportunity to earn millions while working from home. "I couldn’t believe it!” Announces some awkward, unpolished voice. "And neither will you! Soon you’ll be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a day working from the comfort of your home.”

Well guess what? Surprise, surprise you shouldn’t believe it. When you part with your hard earned cash, what you’re most likely to receive is a shoddy PDF and perhaps a couple of random videos. I’ve helped companies to sell some pretty awful products in the past (I’m not proud of it!).

One time I got to try out the product – which claimed to be the turning point in people’s lives – and it turned out to be a series of videos that were made purely from screen captures without so much as a some narration. It was literally a video of a guy clicking some things on a screen in order to log into a profile and sign up to a autoresponder. Absolutely terrible value for money.

And it’s not just the marketers that take this approach. Many webmasters and bloggers are just as guilty and this is where you might start to put your hand up too. Because as a writer, this is another type of business I’ve worked for:

Someone who chooses a niche because they think it offers a good opportunity (not because they have any passion or interest for the subject matter). Someone who then hires a bunch of writers (that’s where I get roped in) and gives them a bunch of generic titles.

Let’s say the subject is fitness, so the site owner will come up with some topics off the top of their head like:

“How to Get Great Abs” Or “How to Lose Weight FAST!”

The articles couldn’t be more generic, less interesting or more out of touch with the interesting stuff that is actually going on in the industry right now. It’s a bad start… Worse is that sometimes the site owner will do so little research into their niche that they’ll give me titles that are factually inaccurate.

I had a health blog recently that asked me to write about ‘The 16 Symptoms of Prediabetes’. Well seeing as prediabetes is asymptomatic, that’s pretty difficult. Another recently asked me to write about how you could build great biceps with press ups. Well, seeing as press ups target the triceps and pecs and not the biceps… You get the idea!

So why do these companies pick those titles? Simple answer: they either saw them on another site, they did some keyword research and found that other people were searching for the topics, or they pulled them out of the air without giving it any thought. Choosing a title based on a keyword is the most popular example and i seems like a good idea. After all, that means people will search for it and they’ll find it.

Small Businesses Are Not Exempt!

But perhaps you’re reading this as a small business owner and thinking it doesn’t apply to you! After all, if you don’t write content for a blog then you can’t be guilty of generic titles. But the same cynical approach and lack of care and attention regularly goes into business efforts. In fact, ma businesses are even more guilty of this. Take for example those businesses that want to promote themselves online through social media and do so by writing the most generic posts imaginable.

I worked in marketing for an EPOS provider (Electronic Point Of Sale), which essentially means that it built toll systems for other companies. They insisted that every post I should make on their blog had to read like this: "Our EPOS system is the best in the industry… bar none!” "Find out why companies LOVE our new EPOS system!”

Again, makes sense on paper. After all, it’s a business site, so of course it’s going to promote its products. When they eventually did get me to write on their blog, they had me writing posts on EPOS systems and EPOS systems alone. The site itself was bland white and dark blue and with zero character or anything to set it apart....

If any of what you've read sounds familiar in anyway I recommend you get a copy of 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today To Grow Your Audience

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Next we will take a look Building Your Brand→