A member of my BNI group gave me an idea I’ve been ranting about to others for quite some time but obviously not heeding. (Marketer: market thyself), and that is the really important element of listening to what people want, instead of just ‘what you would like to shove down their throats because you think it’s a really good idea.’ A high end painter, Alberto was ready for the big plunge, wanting to re-vamp his website and his online marketing campaign. Having had an existing website that just sort of sat there not doing much of anything for him, Alberto was excited about the idea of creating an optimized website that was built not only to showcase his beautiful work, but to rise to the top of Google and the other search engine ranks, and act as a lead generator for his business as well. We’d met, discussed his vision and his options and all the bells and whistles we could implement to attain his goals, the costs involved, the ROI (return on investment) and I left him to mull it over. A few weeks later, after several attempts to get in touch with him, Alberto approached me quietly to ask if it would be ok for him to get to me his now defunct website to see if it was possible to “re-work” it, optimize it, update it, freshen it up a bit. Why had I not been able to read between the lines in our past meetings and communications? I should have been able to, or at the very least known to ask what his roadblocks were, as I definitely would have picked up some hesitation had I been paying attention.

And there’s the point, well, two points:

• paying attention, and listening, really listening, and
• offering options

So now Alberto and I are embarking on an exploratory jaunt into his old website to see if we can re-vamp his tired old website and try and save him some money while accomplishing the same goal: online marketing and growth. Sometimes this works, sometimes not so much, as it often costs more to re-work something old than razing and starting over, but you never know until you go there. We’re going to try and make it happen, and now I have a new, very cool service I’m going to delve into more heavily in the upcoming year: Optimizing old, tired websites to be found in the search engines, rather than sitting on page 6, ie “Wasteland”.