There is a kind of cruel, ancient story that goes like this… A group of people are standing at a river bank and suddenly they hear the pained cries of a baby. Shocked by what they are hearing, they then see an infant floating in discomfort in the water.
One person immediately dives in to rescue the child. But as the rescue is commencing, yet another baby comes floating down the river in the same way, and then another and another! People continue jumping in to save the babies and then see that one person has started to walk away from the group towards the bridge.
Angrily they shout at the person, “Where do you think you are going? Come here and help!”
The response was this: “I am. I’m going upstream to stop whoever’s throwing babies into the river!
The story is a mad one, but if we remove the content of the story and just focus on the metaphor, there is a massive lesson for us to learn both in business and in life.
When your online business is not working as well as you might hope and customers are not buying or your sales material isn’t converting – do not a/ blame them or b/ dive straight in and see the problem from the end.
You must go back to your strategy and check what is going on behind the scenes – what are you missing in the back-end that the front-end users are experiencing? It’s about focusing on the source of the problem and healing it, rather than trying to bail yourself out by adding more money or focus into something that is already flawed and not working. You need better foundations.
Imagine that the babies are your customers and each one is unhappy, there is no point in wasting your energy dealing with customers by trying to convince them that everything is fine and that they are wrong because your site/strategy (whatever) is perfect and other people have ‘said so’, instead go to the source – listen to them – why are people leaving? Why are the numbers decreasing? Why are people complaining? What can you do as a whole rather than trying to deal with the consequences?
Below are 3 overlooked things that I want you to focus on and see if there are any corrections to be made within your business that may be stopping your business from growing:
1. Are you using old strategies? Long form articles, chasing influencers and buying links are all old-school strategies that won’t grow your online business or presence as much as you think they might. It might have worked then, but you must move with whatever is working now.
2. Are you copying others or being authentic? We are told to model the already successful and yes, this is good. But not at the cost of who you are. People want an original, not a clone. If they want the person you are copying, they’ll go with them. You need to be you and don’t copy everything that the successful leaders are doing. What you want is to take what you need from others and design your own brand around it in a personal ‘you’ way.
3. Are you focused on building traffic? It doesn’t matter how good your website looks or how your funnels are set up… If you don’t have website traffic, you don’t have a business.
Current strategies that build traffic include interviews, podcasts and writing guest posts for large authority publications. You can always jazz up your systems if you have an audience, but it’s ineffective the other way around.
Ultimately, the problem unfortunately lies with you and how you are marketing, not the customers. If something isn’t going the way you want, don’t dive into the river to try and fix it, go to the bridge and see the root of the problem before moving on or throwing more money into an existing and floundering strategy.
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