It’s often difficult to know whether or not you’re doing the right thing in your business.
Partly because there’s often no agreement on what’s right and what’s wrong/
I was recently reading a post about getting links to your website – something most of us at least try to do because it’s one of the things on most internet marketing checklists.
Amongst other things, the post said that he was convinced he knew what he was talking about because he’d spent several thousand dollars to test the ideas.
That’s a lot different from most internet marketers who’ll read a piece of news and take it as the truth with no testing whatsoever.
It’s also a lot different from the fake news that’s been the focus of attention recently where people will see a headline on Facebook, decide that it seems plausible and share the item with their friends. Even if they haven’t read the article, which often contradicts its own headline or does the standard tabloid trick of only mentioning the headline again almost at the end of the article to heavily qualify the original premise.
Being fooled by stories on the web isn’t difficult. Even professional journalists get taken in sometimes as this article shows. I subscribe to The Onion’s newsletter so I’d probably spot those but there are so many other fake news sites and they’re evolving so fast that I doubt anyone can keep up to date.
By the way, if you’d like to know more about how these stories get spread through the media, Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday is an interesting if scary read.
If full time journalists can get fooled by stories that should – at least in theory – be easy to research, have we got any hope of finding the truth in our internet marketing?
A test I often use to work out whether or not I’m doing the right thing is whether or not I’d be comfortable explaining what I’m doing to an authority figure. That could be your mother, your school’s head teacher, whoever works best for you.
If I’d be bowing my head and muttering or evading the subject, that’s a good sign it’s not the right thing. That should keep you away from buying fake views, spamming blog comments and all sorts of other “absolutely safe” methods that are often taught and sold.
And whilst there’s no substitute for testing, it’s certainly a good quick test to run before you go off and do something daft just because it’s in that shiny new product you’ve bought or in an email that turned up unexpectedly in your inbox.
The other side of the “doing the right thing” equation is that you actually have to be doing something.
The internet moves so fast that doing nothing is almost always the wrong thing to be “doing”.
Making a habit of doing something towards your business – preferably daily – is essential. If you don’t, it’s akin to running a coffee shop but never unlocking the doors and letting the public in unless they’ve called for an appointment first.
If there’s no movement from you, there’s a very high chance there’ll be no movement in your business.
You could strike lucky and hit on a niche that earns you money from a one-off investment of your time. But that’s highly unlikely. You’ve only got to look at the TV, movie and music industries to see that. If the momentum isn’t kept going, something else takes over, even if it’s your favourite show or artist (if they’re too old, you may even begin to wonder if they’re still alive).
So even if you don’t get the chance to experiment much, at least make sure that you’re doing something to keep your internet marketing ticking over until you can summon up some extra enthusiasm for it!