Getting to Where You Want to Be
Posted On: 2014-03-31
What an interesting day this has been ... and it's not even 2pm.
While we've been working hard to get some paid work done today we've also been fielding phone calls and visits from clients who really should have more sense. Unfortunately though ... like most people these day ... their first response is always to blame someone else.
Early this morning the phone rang and there was a most indignant client claiming that we had done something terrible to her website. There were now links all over it that pointed to other sites and there was even someone talking on it and she wanted to know why.
Why? Well I didn't even have to look at her site to know why. Her computer was riddled with Trojans and they were affecting every website she visited ... not just hers. But of course why think that she may have something wrong with her computer when it was easier to blame us.
Phone call number two ... "There's something missing from those instructions you gave me. I can't load any images to my website."
And of course there was nothing missing from the instructions ... he was skipping some of them because he thought he knew a quicker way to get the job done.
The next client called in to the office ... he was concerned that somehow we were faking his search engine results. Yes ... you read that right ... he thought that we were faking his search engine results after his supplier had called him and told him that we must have been faking them because our client was outranking his supplier.
And the supplier was also sure that we were faking those results because we weren't "certified". I'm not sure what we were supposed to be certified for ... or in ... but we must have been cheating ... someone ... somehow ... somewhere.
I truly did not mean to spend some of today beating my head on my desk ... but I couldn't resist the urge after that client left, still wondering if we were doing something underhand with his website.
Do you notice a common thread in those phone calls and the visit? No one stops to think that maybe if there is a problem it's not down to anyone else but themselves. It's easier to blame everyone else than it is to blame yourself and start doing something to fix the problem.
Even our client's supplier was quick to blame us because we could get our client's site to outrank his. But then ... as I pointed out to our client ... we've been doing search engine optimisation for over 16 years and we know how to build a website that ranks well.
His supplier on the other hand has a website that looks as though it was built by an eight year old with absolutely zero knowledge of the importance of the basics of SEO. And the source code showed me the crudest HTML I have ever seen in my life. Even my very first website ... the site that I wrote in Notepad ... didn't have such ugly code behind it.
But it's easier to blame someone else than spend the time to learn how to build a decent looking website and make an effort to learn the very fundamentals of search engine optimisation. Why bother learning those things when it's easier to whinge and whine about other people's work?
Of course you wouldn't do that would you? You wouldn't bitch and complain that you're getting beaten by everyone else would you?
You would take positive action to learn all you can about every facet of being a webmaster and instead of wasting time complaining you would be spending it with your head buried in everything from the psychology of marketing to understanding your stats and discovering the wonderful things you can do with your .htaccess file wouldn't you?
Well I hope you would because that's the only way you're going to get ahead in this or any other industry. You're not going to learn a thing by complaining but you certainly will learn plenty if you set out to find the answers that you need to make your business grow.
Sure, you might have to improvise, adapt and overcome ... and it might take a while to gain the knowledge you need ... and it's going to be hard work. But if you don't do that ... if you just sit around bitching about what others are doing to get ahead then you will never get to where you want to be.