How To Protect Your Business From Bad Internet Marketing Advice

by Bonnie Boots

Here's a fact of doing business on the internet: sooner or later you will find yourself paying good money for bad advice.

It's sad but true. No matter what type of business you're in, no matter how intelligent you are, no matter how careful you are, you will, at one time or another, pay someone for doing more harm than good.

Of course, this isn't exclusive to internet business. Falling victim to bad advice certainly happens to business owners in the brick and mortar world. But there's a special circumstance in internet business that makes it almost certain to happen to you. That circumstance is this--you likely understand very little about the technology of the web.

You may sputter and say otherwise, but the truth is, all your time, energy and attention are devoted to the details of your own business. So unless your full-time business involves internet technology, you can't possible know as much as the person you regard as your internet business consultant.

That person may be a web designer. Or they may introduce themselves as a marketing guru or an SEO (search engine optimization) expert. But in many cases, the person you will come to regard as you internet marketing consultant is simply the first person you hire to help you do business on the internet.

Let's say you hired someone as your web designer. You begin to ask that person all sorts of questions about doing business on the internt. Wanting to keep a new client happy, your designer steps beyond their expertise as a graphic designer and begins giving you advice on marketing. And you start to think of the designer as your all-purpose go-to-guy for questions about internet marketing.

Or flip this scenario over and suppose that you hire someone to help you with SEO. As you ask more and more questions, they begin giving you advice about everything from product creation to site design.

In both of these situations, the person you've hired has stepped outside of their area of expertise. The advice they give you may be correct. But there's ample opportunity for their advice to be far off the mark.

An SEO expert, for instance, is not going to know even half of what an experienced graphic designer knows about the ways in which colors and placement influence people.

Likewise, an expert in graphic design may have picked up bits of information about search engines along the way, but that doesn't begin to compare with the wealth of information an expert in SEO can share with you.

But that won't keep these folks from answering questions about areas in which they are not expert. First, because they want to help you and keep you happy. Second, because human nature makes it hard for most people to say, "I don't know." And third, because many people overestimate their own competence.

So when you ask questions beyond a person's area of expertise, they'll answer. And because you don't know any better, you'll take whatever advice they give. If you're lucky, that advice will be helpful, or even benign. At worst, that non-expert advice will threaten the future of your business.

This sort of mistake can be costly. That's because most business owners won't realize they've been given bad advice until the damages begin to pile up.

My average client has wasted more than twenty thousand dollars on bad advice by the time they come to me. And they face more expenses to repair the damage. Often, both their finances and their self-confidence are stretched to the breaking point. The first thing they say to me is, "I don't know how it reached this point. I feel so stupid."

These business owners are not stupid. Like most entrepreneurs, they're highly intelligent and self-motivated people who've made one mistake: they've entered a filed they know little about-the vastly complex field of internet marketing-and put all their trust into one person.

No one person can be an expert on everything there is to know about internet marketing. It's too vast and it changes too fast. This means the best way to protect yourself and your business is to make sure you get advice from more than one web expert.

Even if you have every confidence in the person you regard as your itinerant business consultant, it's money well spent to occasionally bring in an expert for a look-see. Ask them to review your internet operation, give you their opinion and make suggestions. Make it clear that you only want a consultation, and not a bid on having further work done.

Such a review can open your eyes to all sorts of things you'd never see yourself. It can point out potential problems as well as potential profits you may be missing. It can alert you to questions you should be asking the person you regard as your internet business consultant. And it can save you from throwing money at not-really-experts long before they do untold damage.

 

 
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