His Marketing Mindset Was Keeping Him From Getting The Results He Wanted

Do you like stories? Today, in this article, I am going to share a little story of a past experience I had with a gentleman who wanted to use articles to promote his website. He is a smart guy who had built himself a decent website. He just wasn’t getting the kinds of results he wanted or felt he deserved. I blame his mindset for that. Listen to his story and then decide for yourself whether you think it was his mindset or not. Jim contacted me because he wanted help generating some publicity for his website. He had an affiliate style website. His website was about six pages as I recall. It looked very professional. I imagine the site would probably convert pretty well because he was kind of meticulous with details. He made everything look just right. There is nothing about his website that would make a person lose trust, at least not from the overall appearance. Maybe the content or the offer was not up to snuff. The point I am trying to make is that his graphics and presentation were excellent on the website. That site targets a very specific audience (a business person) who is looking for a service provider for a very important but seldom though of business service. The people who would find his site are people who would be looking to hire a company who provides that sort of service. Jim’s site repackaged a service that was actually provided by another company entirely. Jim just sent the visitors from his site to go sign up to the real service. Then Jim would get a monthly commission from that customer. The affiliate process was packaged in such a way that the customer thought Jim’s company was actually doing the work. They would not know otherwise. Jim had gotten some legitimate publicity for his website because he had made some relationships in a really specific niche where people could really use his service. Those relationships paid off because he actually got some news coverage for his service. Unfortunately, that coverage only provided a short term boost to his results. He got a few customers from it, but nowhere near the kind of results he thought this site was capable of. That is why he wanted my help. He asked me what he should be doing differently. One of the main tactics that I use to generate publicity for websites is article marketing. That is what I recommended to him. He said that he already had a few articles published at places. He then proceeded to show me where they were published. “Looks like a good start.” I told him. I suggested he should do a lot more of that. You could tell that he was less than excited about the idea. He thought that his website deserved more natural publicity. He had been working online long enough to develop the impression that article marketing was for spammers or for low quality sites. He felt his website was above that. He thought that getting an article here or getting an article there was good enough article marketing for him. I struggled to get Jim to see the light. I tried telling him “Dude, you are going to need way more articles than that.” I suggested that if he had those articles numbering at least over fifty unique well written articles published at decent places, that he would start seeing some much better results. I just couldn’t convince him. He dropped a couple of names in the internet marketing industry. He asked me what I thought about those people. They are the kind of people who sell bright shiny objects. You know the ones. They sell one button fixes to complex problems. The problem is that their one button fixes don’t work. I was thinking “Awe man.” My heart was sinking. I was like “Listen Jim. I know those guys seem popular and the things coming out of their mouths sound great; but, I am telling you that there is no shortcut for this stuff. Those guys are great marketers. You are their customer. They are telling you what you want to hear, not what is really in your best interest. You are already on the right track to getting results. Just publish a bunch of other articles like the ones you have already done. Publish them at a bunch of different places, even guest blogs.” Jim could tell that I didn’t respect the people he asked about. From that point on, I kind of fell out of favor with him. They had already worked their magic brainwashing on him. He wanted to believe that the snake oil these other guys were selling was going to work for him. I thought to myself “Later Jim. Don’t come crying back to me when you are still struggling to get results after dropping two grand with one of those schmucks.” It was like watching an alcoholic walk back into a liquor store after he had been dry for a little while. Was his marketing mindset holding him back? You be the judge.