Shortcuts Often Mean the Longest Possible Route
Discover why marketing shortcuts backfire and learn the real secret to online success: consistent work beats quick fixes every time.
Hey marketer! 👋
I feel like a lot of people have fallen into the trap of searching for shortcuts and holy grails. Not just in marketing, but generally - in life. We're looking for efficient weight loss programs (ideally 5 minutes a day and a six-pack in a month), guides to easy money-making, quick career advancement... We somehow forget that some things simply can't be cheated much. 🤷🏻♂
The Shortcut Trap in Marketing
In the context of marketing, you can buy tons of fake followers on social media and hope some real ones will catch on. You can write (or have written) fake testimonials and hope they'll attract real customers, buy backlinks to improve your search rankings... Maybe it works. From my experience, it doesn't.
The internet public is going crazy over artificial intelligence in a big way. It's a powerful tool (that brings new possibilities and pushes the boundaries of many fields), but many people see it primarily as cheap shortcuts. They're having content written for their websites en masse and publishing it without thinking. I'm getting nonsensical generated texts that clients want to put on websites without properly reading them or thinking about whether they actually make sense. 🙆🏼♂️
They uncritically take it as quality-created content that they want to publish right away and even translate with Google into other languages (again without checking). Or generating social media posts - they have AI write it and get activity without work. The excitement about instant creation of any content has completely clouded their own judgment. 🤦🏻♂️ And that's wrong.
Shortcuts Don't Exist
Shortcuts don't exist. Murphy's Law aptly states that "A shortcut often means the longest possible route." It's still JUST A TOOL. Another tool. Not magic that will suddenly do everything perfectly for us. After all, it's such a novelty that we haven't learned to use it properly yet. Let's follow news, discover innovations, acknowledge progress, but critically. 🙏🏻
Roll Up Your Sleeves
The best approach is to simply roll up your sleeves and get to work. Don't waste time looking for miraculous shortcuts and count on the fact that it simply takes some time. Write an article, take photos, describe a product, shoot a video, answer questions, build an audience, collect references, achieve good search engine positions, and so on.
Be careful - don't confuse shortcuts with professional advice! Those make sense. They'll help you avoid unnecessary mistakes. I'm thinking of suspiciously quick solutions that promise big progress with minimal work. When you encounter something like that, be skeptical. Find out how it's supposed to work. Verify. Thoroughly. And don't be afraid of work.
Moreover - you'll never be finished on the internet. It's continuous work with information.
"Content in any form is the most important element of any marketing campaign."
~ Rebecca Lieb
💡 Practical Tip:
Reviews and ratings from satisfied customers can work wonders. But how do you get them? Usually, people are more likely to write a negative review when they're dissatisfied than a positive one when everything was as it should be. I have a tip for an amazingly simple but functional solution.
Recently, I've seen a sticker with a call to add a Google review several times in practice. Along with showing the number of stars, it's an elegant way to get reviews from customers in a brick-and-mortar store. Isn't that great?
You serve a customer with a smile in the store, they're satisfied, and before you say goodbye, you offer them the option to easily add a review. And so they don't have to search for it, they just need to scan a QR code nicely placed in sight. And you have a few more ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for your collection. Verified. Real. Valuable.
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Looking forward to seeing you in the next article!
Jan Barborik
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