Chapter 3 BOC
"You've got to realize you don't just put up a website and walk away"Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, pg. 28.
I've been freelancing for a little bit over a year now. When I started out, I was the sole proprietor of a chop shop. When you placed your "order" with me, you were giving me site specifics, colors, fonts, text, images, etc. Eventually, we'd agree on a price, a deadline (the quicker, the better of course) and off I'd go to the trenches and build your web page. I usually turned it around pretty fast too. Got a nice little reputation. What I didn't realize at the time is that my clients were coming to me for the service of marketing, not necessarily web design.
Of course, web design is part of it, but all most of my clients knew was that they had a business and they needed a website, because they were supposed to. Once it was built, they walked away, we never put together an action plan for how they would market their site or even how their site was going to act as a marketing tool for them. Eek. You live and learn.
Now my initial consultation includes a survey that aims to find out what my client's goals are. Usually, they haven't even considered putting together an action plan for their site, they just figured once the site was up, thousands of people would find them and go wild over whatever their services might be. This just isn't the case. Site visitors are savvier than ever and they don't want to try and figure out the morse code of your website and more importatly, they want to be engaged. If your site hasn't been updated in over a year, give it up. No one's interested, certainly not you, how could you be if you haven't taken the time to really tweak your content and make sure it's up to date? Websites are like little kids, you have to feed them because in doing so you're feeding your site visitors and ultimately, that's what it's about. Getting them to stick around, come back and ultimately buy your product, or subscribe to your newsletter or whatever...
