Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Business insights, marketing tips and thought-provoking distinctions. In Byte to Byte, marketing strategist, growth advisor, and business coach Steve Johnsen informs and inspires with a wealth of tips on digital marketing, entrepreneurship, sales, and personal growth. You can also listen on:

Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come

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Myth: If you build it, they will come.

Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they’re going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn’t the case.

Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it’s going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I’m going to have people finding it and get customers from that website.

Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you’re going to launch a website and automatically have people finding it is sort of like opening a new business, printing up a whole bunch of business cards, and sitting at your new desk with your business cards waiting for people to show up. It’s just not going to happen. At a minimum, you need a sign out on the street that says what kind of business you’re in so that people can walk in.

But more than that, when you launch a new business, most people understand that you need some advertising. You need to send out some flyers and maybe need to make some phone calls. You want to do something to get people to learn about your new business and come and seek you out.

Well, this is also true with your website. Your website is a great way to get people to find you, but once the site is launched, it does take a fair amount of effort to get it found by the people who are likely to become your best customers. In fact, the effort involved in getting your website found by the right people is usually a lot greater than the effort in getting your website built and launched in the first place.

When we’re sitting down with new clients working on their web design, one of the things that we do differently from many other designers is figure out the long-term strategy for how their website is going to grow their business so that this strategy can actually be incorporated into the design process. But even when your site is already built and launched, you can always go back and develop a plan for getting your site found and for making the site effective as your number 1 employee.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

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Myth: SEO is simply pay-as-you-go.

Not true! There’s actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business.

One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it’s simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website.

Well, that’s just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently.

Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the search engine to have somebody click on the link that leads to my website. In that kind of model, it is true in a sense that the more dollars I pay for clicks, the more people I’m going to get to my website. With a pay-per-click model like Google AdWords?that’s a very common example of a pay-per-click type of advertising?the more money I pay, the more people I’m going to get as a kind of a general rule. And as soon as I stop paying, I’m going to stop getting people to my website.

Search engine optimization works very, very differently. Search engine optimization means doing a whole lot of technical things (which I’m not going to get into) to make the search engines think that your website is the best result for people who are online searching for a service provider. Therefore, when somebody goes in and searches for the kind of business that you provide, the search engine is going to display you as the best link. You’re not paying to be put in that position?at least not directly. You’re not paying the search engine to be put in that position, but rather you’ve done a whole lot of work to make the search engine consider you as the best result for certain people.

Now with SEO, you’re not going to see an immediate result. It usually takes time to do the work to get your website to the place where it is seen as one of the best options by the search engine. But once you get there, it’s very easy to maintain that position if you keep doing the work. You can stay ahead of the competition at a much lower overall cost than with the pay-per-click campaign.

Now the funny thing is, even with a pay-per-click campaign?although it is a model where if I pay more, I get more traffic?most of the pay-per-click advertisers give quality scores to the campaigns and the ads and the web pages, which means that there can be as much as an 800% difference on Google AdWords with the amount of traffic you’re getting for your campaign with the exact same budget, depending on how well it’s done.

So, one person may be running a Google AdWords campaign spending $3,000 a month and getting half of the visitors that somebody else is getting on a budget of $1,000 a month, because the one who’s investing $1,000 a month is doing it right, and doing it really, really well, with high quality scores, whereas the person who’s spending $3,000 a month is just throwing money at the wall and it’s not getting nearly as much result.

Every day, there are hundreds of people online searching for you and the service you provide, and I want them to find you. So this is not a simple pay-as-you-go model, but rather it’s a matter of figuring out what is the best strategy, short-term and long-term, for your business?whether to use a pay-per-click search-engine-marketing campaign, or to use search engine optimization campaign, or both?and to do them in such a way that you get the maximum result for your investment, to make your website effective as your number 1 employee.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same

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Myth: All web hosting is the same.

Simply not true. There’s a huge range of types and qualities of web hosting providers and in the impact that that web hosting has on your business.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk to you today about web hosting. There is a myth out there that is very common, that all web hosting is the same.

The fact is that there are all kinds of web hosting providers, and a wide range in the quality of their equipment, how that equipment is used, the types of data centers the hosting is in, and–what’s most important and the bottom line–in the impact that web hosting can have on growing your business.

Now, web hosting is one of those terms that kind of makes people’s eyes glaze over, so I hope I don’t get too geeky and technical on you here. But it’s really important to understand what web hosting is. Your website is actually a collection of files sitting on a computer somewhere. Typically, it’s a collection of text documents with some HTML and CSS code, as well as some documents containing software code, along with some pictures and maybe some videos. And if there’s software, the computer it’s on needs to have the ability to run that software. But either way, your website lives on a computer somewhere. It’s a collection of files on a computer.

That computer may be a good computer, or it may be a really old, really slow computer. It may be on a computer with ten websites on it, or it may be on a computer with ten thousand websites. Now, you know on your own personal computer, if you get too many windows or documents open, your computer can really slow down.

Well, if you think about it, if you have a computer that has ten thousand websites running?which, by the way, is a very common scenario with cheap web hosts?that computer is going to be very slow. Not only that, it could be an older computer with not so much horsepower and not so much memory. And not only that, that computer could be stuck off in a corner, far away from the Internet backbone, which means that the person who wants to access your website has to go through a whole bunch of connections to get there.

The end result is that you can have a website that’s on a slow computer that’s running even slower because of the ten thousand other websites running on the same machine that’s far away from the Internet backbone. And that experience for your customer visiting your website can be less than ideal.

Your pages may load slowly. Occasionally those computers with ten thousand websites on them can be targets for hackers, and you can get some malware or some sources of spam (or worse) on the computer that’s hosting your website.

This is not only a bad experience for your users; the search engines don’t like those kinds of situations either. So your site is probably not going to rank nearly as well on one of those cheap web hosts. And I’ve seen many occasions where this got someone’s website banned from Google.

It’s also possible to host your website on a really fast, new computer, in a good data center that’s close to the Internet backbone, on a machine that has only a few websites on it (with a lot of resources dedicated to your site). In that situation, your site is going to perform a lot better. The search engines are going to like it a lot better. More people are going to be finding you in online search. More people are going to be liking your website when they do find you. And even though it’s very hard to measure and nobody’s going to tell you they hired you because you have a good web host, this usually results in your getting more business.

The difference in investment between a quality web host and a cheap web host can be significant, but when you compare it to the opportunity cost of how much business you could lose on a cheap web host versus how much more business you could gain on a high quality web host, to me it’s an investment that is well, well worth it. In fact, there is no way I would ever want to put any of my websites on anything but a high quality web host.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same

Antifragile

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We hear a lot about resilience. People talk about being okay in spite of circumstances. And we’ve all experienced the opposite, being hurt by something that happened to us, either physically or psychologically.

But there’s a third state of being that we all have access to that may benefit us even more.

The scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this third state of being in his book Antifragile. He observed that there are things which are easily broken (fragile), and things which are not easily broken (resiliant). He coined the word antifragile to describe things which are made stronger by volatility, stress and adversity.

There are materials that illustrate this. Glass is robust up to a certain point, but then it shatters with the right amount of stress in a sudden shock. Brass is fairly resilient. You can drop it, step on it or throw it and it will not shatter. But a bicycle frame made out of carbon nanotubes actually gets stronger when you pound on it. Instead of labeling, “Fragile. Handle with care,” you could label the antifragile package, “Benefits from shock.”

A fire is also a good illustration. A candle is fragile, and is easily blown out by a slight breath. A blow torch is resilient. It is not easily blown out, even in very windy conditions. But a forest fire is antifragile. The more you blow on it, the hotter it burns. If you throw logs in front of a forest fire to try to stop it, you only feed the fire.

Our bodies are mostly antifragile. Without stress, our muscles and bones become weak. Stress, resistance and a constantly changing outward environment is what makes us stronger (within reason of course).

What we don’t realize is that fragility, resilience and antifragility are also emotional states that we can choose in response to any situation. Say something bad about me, and I could crumble (fragile), or I may not care (resilient). Or I may decide to work harder to prove you wrong (antifragile).

The more I am conscious of this choice that I have, the better my life will be. In my life, at any given moment there are things that I am upset about (fragile), things that I am indifferent to (resilient), and things that have me upping my game (antifragile).

We love movies about antifragile people. Rocky. Rudy. Remember the Titans. How much more powerful we will be in our business and in our daily lives when we choose to live the same way. Antifragile is a place to come from, in the way we work, in the way we interact with people. Put a label on yourself, “Benefits from shock,” or, “Benefits from adversity.” Be the kite that rises against the wind.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Antifragile

Wealth Comes from Service

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A lot of people have the misconception that wealth is things and comes from having things. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, wealth comes from service. Put another way, wealth comes from our relationships with other people.

Here’s a brief thought experiment inspired by the work of Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Imagine that everyone in the world has made you their heir, and then suddenly everyone dies. You are now the owner of trillions upon trillions of dollars. You own all of the gold in the world, all of the silver in the world, even all of the banks in the world. Every car, every private jet, every yacht, and every expensive toy on the planet belongs to you. You own all of the world’s real estate, including every high-rent office building in every city on the planet.

But all of your gold, silver and cash cannot buy you anything. There are no new goods being produced, and no one to hire to provide you with any service. There is no pilot to fly your private jet, and no one running the oil refineries to produce fuel for your jets, yachts, boats and cars. There is no one to maintain the roads. Your high-rises are worthless because there is no one to rent anything, and there is no one who will maintain them for you.

The toys are fun (for a few days), but lose their appeal quickly because there is no one to enjoy them with. The worst part is that the tens of thousands of people who used to labor to provide you with groceries, electricity, running water, medical care, and everything else that made your life comfortable are now no longer available. You are quickly reduced to eking out a subsistence living as a hunter/gatherer in a decaying landscape. And the purpose you used to find in your life via your career, your family and the communities you served no longer exists.

None of the things that you own provide any real wealth. So we confused cause and effect. Real wealth results in having things, but having things is not wealth. True wealth comes from serving others and being served by others.

In sales and in business, it’s also easy to confuse this cause and effect. Success in sales and business IS a matter of serving others, and is its own reward; the tangible rewards that come later are the effect of that service.

Every day in driving to and from my office through the Denver Tech Center, I pass billions of dollars worth of property — more wealth than I could ever need or use in a lifetime. And yet none of that has any meaning apart from the people that I am also surrounded by — and that I am put on the planet to serve.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Wealth Comes from Service

How hard will you “try”?

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“Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda

The legendary English hypnotist and stage performer Darren Brown once gave a back-stage, behind-the-scenes interview where he explained how he does some of his hypnotism acts. When Darren puts someone in a hypnotic state, their subconscious mind is in control. Then when he tells them, “Try to remember your name,” or “Try to stand up and walk,” they cannot do it.

This always amazes the conscious audience members. To them it appears that Darren told them to walk. They don’t realize that by saying, “Try to walk,” he commanded them to stay put. As Darren explains it, the word “Try” is a trigger for failure.

If I say I’m going to “try” to make 10 cold calls today, I’m unconsciously programming my brain for failure. If I’m going to “try” to meet my sales goals, I will most likely fall short.

How about “trying” to do nothing today? Simply decide what you want to accomplish, and get it done.

To your success!

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Three words that guarantee failure