One of the beliefs that runs through the fifty6 way of delivering internet marketing success to our clients is that we’re in this for the long term. We focus not on quick fixes, but on sustainable growth through trackable changes. That means making small changes, and tracking exactly how they work for every individual client. The downside of that, is that we can find ourselves with long periods of seemingly limited growth. Here are 5 tips showing how to deal with that for yourself.
1. Believe In The Ethical And Moral High Ground
The first tip is also arguably the most important. You’ve got to get your head round why you’re giving up on quick fixes. Quick fixes are not the answer for long term, sustainable succes. Sure, you could go an buy a huge amount of incoming links from someone offering you 50 .gov or .edu links for £50, but you’ve got to remember that something that looks too good to be true is probably (and I mean definitely) too good to be true. You want your business to be successful long term, which means that you have to focus on doing things right and realistically. Would you want to buy from a company that you knew was cheating to get their business in front of you? If the answer is anything but no, you’re in the wrong place. I don’t want to give cheats my money, so I don’t use my clients hard earned on cheating practises.
2. Make Small Changes, Often
I’ve spoken about the importance of small changes in an earlier blog post, ‘Racecar is Racecar Backwards‘. That post can be summed up to say that you should change one thing at a time, and then wait to see the impact of that change on your business. If it’s a change that is aimed at moving up the rankings, then wait for the search engines to have a chance to see that change and rank you accordingly. If it’s a change in the user experience, give the change a chance to create enough data to decide whether it has been positive or negative. If you change more than one thing, you’ll never know what to change back if anything goes wrong.
3. Search For The Intermediate Success Signals
Your overall target is most likely to sell more of your product or service to your visitors. However, if you just track your bottom line, you’re likely to leave this idea of the long game behind pretty soon. In an ideal world, you’ll make one of the small changes in point #2 and your revenue and profit will go up. The vast majority of the time, however, this won’t be the case. So, for the sake of your sanity, you need to keep track of the intermediate success signals: higher organic search traffic for the keyword you’re focussing on, improved rankings, higher time on your target page, more interaction from visitors and more. You need to decide what stats are going to be an important sign to you that you’re heading in the right direction and then track them. The revenue will come.
4. Be Consistent
Essentially, this point can be summed up by simply saying “Repeat points 1 through 3, constantly”. Make time every week to check where you are, what changes have been positive, which have been negative and act accordingly. A lack of consistency at this point will undo all your hard work and send your train off the rails.
5. Look Back, Enjoy
This is a long game, and so you will soon lose track of how far you’ve come if you only look back on your stats for the last month vs the previous one. Give yourself some time once a month to look back at your stats now vs the ones at the beginning of your long game journey. I can almost guarantee that you’ll be surprised how much those small gains that you’ve been tracking have added up. For a good example of this from the fifty6 stable, check out our case study over 9 months for Replace Base. Give yourself a pat on the back, and then continue points 1 through 4 again – don’t get complacent and continue to grow!
I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or success stories in the comments. Thanks for reading!
