Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Are You Building Castles or Bridges?
My marketing career has always focused on building castles. What I mean by that is that I've always focused on adding things to make the business structures I build bigger and more impressive.
Creating new content that I add to the various sites that I do for myself and for my clients. Adding new and better products. Always expanding what I've already built. Always building new structures, new sites, new e-stores.
I build castles. Always bigger, always better.
Some of my business friends tease me that I'm a regular content-generating machine. They marvel at the amount and quality of new content I generate while they struggle to generate a fraction of what I do.
Building castles all the time leads to a problem, though.
The problems with building castles
If you spend all your time inside the castle, building it taller and stronger and more impressive, you easily lose sight of a key element that negates the whole purpose of those castles -- the bridges and roads that enable the people who come to those castles for shelter to get inside them.
The online properties you build are purposeless unless the people who need them can get inside of them. Those castles are designed to be places where they can find solutions to the problems they face outside of them.
They face problems. Your castle holds the solution. Maybe their problem is a loss of income and your solution is a means of regaining some of it. Maybe their problem is worn out furniture and your solution is new furniture that really fits their lifestyle. Maybe their problem is aching joints and your solution is an effective pain-relief cream.
Inside your castle, they find relief from their problem.
The problem is when you focus too much on adding more to your castle and too little on finding the people who need the shelter you provide in it. I've had other business friends after me lately to make my "castles" more accessible to those who need the shelter those castle provide.
People don't just go roaming the countryside trying to break into random castles in the hope that they'll find what they need there. You have to build doors and bridges to let them in.
Actually, you need to do even more than that. If they aren't milling around right outside your walls, you need to build roads to get them from where they are to where you are.
It's called marketing.
By no means am I the only one guilty of this neglect of doors and bridges and roads. I see a lot of business owners who take great pride in building their online business structures -- so much pride that they, too, never venture outside of them.
It's not only the clients who find safety and security in the castles we build. We find it safe and warm and comfortable in them, too.
Outside those walls, we have no idea what surprises lurk. Staying inside the castle where WE control every detail feels comfortable and safe. But if we don't venture out and build those bridges, we deprive those for whom we built those castles in the first place the shelter that we built them to provide.
I know I will be putting a larger portion of my focus on venturing outside my castles and building those bridges and roads. Anything less and I let people down. I hope to see you all out there doing the same.
Happy bridge building!
Jeff
My marketing career has always focused on building castles. What I mean by that is that I've always focused on adding things to make the business structures I build bigger and more impressive.
Creating new content that I add to the various sites that I do for myself and for my clients. Adding new and better products. Always expanding what I've already built. Always building new structures, new sites, new e-stores.
I build castles. Always bigger, always better.
Some of my business friends tease me that I'm a regular content-generating machine. They marvel at the amount and quality of new content I generate while they struggle to generate a fraction of what I do.
Building castles all the time leads to a problem, though.
The problems with building castles
If you spend all your time inside the castle, building it taller and stronger and more impressive, you easily lose sight of a key element that negates the whole purpose of those castles -- the bridges and roads that enable the people who come to those castles for shelter to get inside them.
The online properties you build are purposeless unless the people who need them can get inside of them. Those castles are designed to be places where they can find solutions to the problems they face outside of them.
They face problems. Your castle holds the solution. Maybe their problem is a loss of income and your solution is a means of regaining some of it. Maybe their problem is worn out furniture and your solution is new furniture that really fits their lifestyle. Maybe their problem is aching joints and your solution is an effective pain-relief cream.
Inside your castle, they find relief from their problem.
The problem is when you focus too much on adding more to your castle and too little on finding the people who need the shelter you provide in it. I've had other business friends after me lately to make my "castles" more accessible to those who need the shelter those castle provide.
People don't just go roaming the countryside trying to break into random castles in the hope that they'll find what they need there. You have to build doors and bridges to let them in.
Actually, you need to do even more than that. If they aren't milling around right outside your walls, you need to build roads to get them from where they are to where you are.
It's called marketing.
By no means am I the only one guilty of this neglect of doors and bridges and roads. I see a lot of business owners who take great pride in building their online business structures -- so much pride that they, too, never venture outside of them.
It's not only the clients who find safety and security in the castles we build. We find it safe and warm and comfortable in them, too.
Outside those walls, we have no idea what surprises lurk. Staying inside the castle where WE control every detail feels comfortable and safe. But if we don't venture out and build those bridges, we deprive those for whom we built those castles in the first place the shelter that we built them to provide.
I know I will be putting a larger portion of my focus on venturing outside my castles and building those bridges and roads. Anything less and I let people down. I hope to see you all out there doing the same.
Happy bridge building!
Jeff
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