As a long-time content marketing writer, I’ve spent years creating materials to boost clients’ online presence and brand awareness. Shame I never followed that example myself.
Practically every man, woman, child and dog has a website these days. For anyone running a business, they’ve become an essential portal to the world. I was a journalist in New York during the whole dotcom boom (and bust). It was a transformative period that changed the model of how we interact.
Yet while recognising their power, and despite my best intentions, I just never got around to developing my own site. Clients instead came through word of mouth, or by me touting for business through phone calls and emails.
Now though, after more than 20 years as a freelance journalist and content marketing copywriter, I’ve finally created a website for my services.
Or should I say I got my colleague Dave Murphy and his team at Red Heaven Design to build one for me.
DIY mistakes to running a business
Since website building has got so much easier over the years, the original idea was to do it myself. After various false starts and prevarication, I signed up for WordPress, set about choosing a theme and began using the Website Builder to construct the pages.
Big mistake. Yes, you no longer need to code. But you do have to devote time to deciphering how the tools work. Pages and fonts can be customised, but not to the look I wanted. I installed the ecommerce plug-ins, but could never figure out how to get them to connect to sell my content writing course and automate the process – which was half the point of having the site.
Because I was wrestling with it at the end of a workday or in snatched moments on the weekend, I ended up spending months fiddling around to create an amateurish-looking website that didn’t do the things I wanted.
Frustrated, I eventually cut my losses and paid Red Heaven Design to do a professional job. It looks far better and, most importantly, works. Passing the reins to Dave gave me peace of mind and freed up time to get on with running my business.
What are your Pareto tasks?
Focus on what you’re good at and want to be doing. Outsource the rest to an expert. The Pareto Principle at work.
Which was a lesson I already knew – or should have known. I thought building the website would be easy. And quick. That I’d save myself money and have control over its future running because I’d done the job myself. All sound reasons. They just collided with reality.
The reality was I didn’t have sufficient technical nous, or the time or interest to acquire it. The builder tools, and my skills in employing them, created a sub-standard result. And the opportunity cost of the hours I wasted mean it would have been far more economic just to pay an expert in the first place.
In the words of Seth Godin: “You’ll pay a lot but get more than you paid for.”
Lessons that apply in so many areas of life.
I see it all the time in firms’ content marketing efforts. People think they can write. After all, they spent years writing essays throughout their education. And perhaps produce reports at work. How hard can it be, right?
Some can even turn a phrase.
But should they be?
I have a Samuel Johnson quote on my desk: “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
Creating marketing content doesn’t require blood, sweat and tears. It should though take thought and careful construction. Time and mental space, in other words. Resources that, for most people, can be put to better use in their real day job.
So focus on what counts. Do what you do best, what gets the greatest results and you enjoy most. Leave the rest to the specialists. And I’ll try to do the same.
Now where was that boiler repair tutorial …