Why Am I Not Getting Traffic To My Website? Why Aren't People Buying My Stuff?
The disconnect between how companies see themselves and their offering, and how customers see them, has never been greater.
How Social Credit And Web 2.0 Marketing Work
Web 2.0 upset and undid many of the marketing truisms of the last half-century, and heralded a buyer-centric Buyer Journey, marked by buyer discretion, signified by buyer selection, and promoted through self-interest and a desire for social credit for users, and thought leadership for vendors.
There are two ways to do about everything in digital marketing:
- A seller-centric way.
- A buyer-centric way.
The variety of aspects these approaches can manifest is unlimited, but in essence, one group is egocentric (seller-centric), and concerned with what they’re getting or pushing or selling, and the other is buyer-centric, able to accept that other people have divergent interests and needs, and is focused on helping buyers as they perform search after search along their Buyer Journey. One believes in success on their own terms, and the other finds success through high-value service.
It really breaks down that simply, which is why ‘success’ has such wide appeal: it’s really evidence of being able to think objectively, empathically; it’s evidence of a high-functioning brain that can cooperate with greater complex systems, like groups of people. Starting a successful business, luck aside, is emblematic of understanding market economics as well as people – at the individual and group levels.
The paradox is that a seller-centric, self-interested, ways of running a business and/or marketing still work, sometimes, for a limited time, and not as well. But that can be enough for some vendors and marketers.
Every 18 months or so, there’s some newfangled ‘hack’ or trick that emerges in marketing; a practice, tool, or technique or method that promises returns without the work, that promises to circumvent the truism that you have to give to receive; that promises a work-around to a foundational failure to understand.
The new technology or trend can be ‘influencer’ marketing, or it can be ‘marketing automation. It could be email automation or in-game advertisements.
But they’re almost always not marketing with consent. Instead, they’re more ingenious and devious ways to practice ‘interruption marketing’.
Eventually, the public rejects it, as they reject all interruptive marketing practices. And it ends up petering out. Like banner ads. Rinse and repeat with new technologies.
Again, this cycle of using technology to shore-up a misunderstanding of human behavior kind of works. 1.91% of the time for search keywords, and .35% for search display ads. In any other enterprise these success rates would cause experts to conclude it wasn’t working.
You’re not getting more traffic because you’re objectively not great.
Honey, lately your low self-esteem is just good common sense. ~ Spanglish, Albert Brooks
In other words: you’re not getting more traffic because you’re objectively not great.
Page Rank looks at engagement analytics and traffic. This means that those who were already loved get loved more since they become more visible based on their popularity. To put it another way: the point Google can help get sales with better Page Rank, you won’t need them.
So this begs the question, how do you become great or awesome?
- Have an amazing product or service offering.
- Be unique, ideally, and at least differentiated in your market.
- Create content that serves your demographic, and which is also high-value and unique. Give content and ask for nothing in return.
- Share and promote that content. As an expert in your line of business, you’re in a unique position to offer content people discover when they’re online – and this is as true of a plant nursery as it is a bicycle shop.
If your product or service are great and unique – everywhere or just in your regional footprint (things like food or items that can’t be shipped) – and you’re helping people, you may not become a millionaire, but you’ll get fans. And human fans are what Google is looking for.
People get confused, because Google is a tech company that operates ‘in the cloud’. But everything comes back to real-world value provision. We have an article explaining that Google can tell whether people come to your business or buy from you after discovering you. They can tell if your site sucks (by bounce, exit rates, and other engagement signals) without a Google employee ever laying eyes on it.
It’s difficult to succeed without visibility in Internet search. And that comes from being awesome and/or unique – and preferably both – in reality.
