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:

Play Full Out

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Work is a game. Life is a game. And the harder you play the game, the more fun it is.

A year or two ago, when I was in really good shape, my brother and I would play pickup basketball with our youth group. We never cared about the score; my brother and I made sure that all the players got to handle the ball, regardless of skill level. We never argued over the points, and we cheered when the opposing team made a good play. But we always played to win, because that meant playing FULL OUT, and that was when the game was fun.

Why is it that so many people enjoy watching the Olympics? What is it about these performances that is so emotional? Because something in us responds when we see people playing the game as if their lives depended on it. It’s a beautiful thing to see people leave everything on the field, playing their hearts out, playing FULL OUT. The thrill of victory…The agony of defeat…But beautiful to watch either way.

It’s the same reason why so many people wait until the end of the season to watch the playoff games. Teams with a lot of heart, playing FULL OUT, giving everything they have. For some reason, human beings were designed to live their lives that way, and when we see it happening, we cry, we laugh, and we cheer.

We also know that those who are playing on that level have invested a lot of work, a lot of training, to get there. They don’t become world class overnight. We appreciate the years of dedication and hard work that have gone into achieving their dream, because deep down, secretly, we long to live the same way ourselves.

Why not start today? Can you be world class in your business? Wouldn’t it be fun to try?

To your success!

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Play Full Out

Steve Johnsen is an SEO specialist, marketing strategist, 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.

Three words that guarantee failure

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There are three words you can use that guarantee failure in just about any endeavor, including both business and personal life.

My friend Gary Barnes (who happens to be one of America’s leading business coaches) does an exercise in his boot camps. He asks everyone in the audience to put their pen on the table, and then instructs them to try to pick it up. Most people figure out after 2-3 times how to follow the instructions correctly—“Trying” to pick up the pen is not the same as actually picking it up!

Darren Brown, the English stage hypnotist and magician, mystifies audiences using the same words. He explained in a rare behind-the-scenes documentary interview that when he gets people in a hypnotic state and tells them, “Try to stand up,” or “Try to lift your hand,” or, “Try to remember your name,” they cannot stand or move their hand or say their name. The reason is that the subconscious mind knows that the word, “Try,” is a command to fail. This seems amazing to the audience looking on, because they generally do not make that connection.

The words, “I will try,” sound very positive, but in fact are a code for, “I am not committed to seeing this happen.” If I ask a client to send over the headshots for their new website and they say “I will try,” I know that it will never really happen. Remember when Luke Skywalker’s spaceship was stuck in the swamp? Luke thought it would be too hard, so when Yoda told him to get it out of the swamp, he said “I will try.” In the immortal words of Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Gary Barnes has created a new icon:

I have almost no sense of balance and even less grace on my feet. (If you see me on the ski slopes, get far, far out of the way!) When I was a freshman in college, I took an ice skating class. I was determined that I was going to learn to skate, or else break some bones in the attempt. At the end of the course my teacher told me, “Steve, I’ve been teaching ice skating for 18 years, and I have never had another student who fell down as much as you.” But despite all the falls during the learning process, I was skating, and enjoying it immensely!

To your success!

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Three words that guarantee failure

Michelangelo and Web Design

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Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was considered to be one of the greatest artists of his day, and has been considered so ever since. Some of his most famous works, the Pieta and David, were made when he was only in his twenties. His crowning achievement, though, may be the work he did not want to do.

In 1508, Michelangelo began painting the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel at the request of Pope Julius II. Michelangelo maintained that he was not a painter. All he wanted to do was sculpt statues. But the Pope was pretty persistent, and eventually Michelangelo agreed to paint the ceiling “for God.” It took him four years of physically exhausting work to complete it.

One thing that Michelangelo insisted on was that he would only do the ceiling if the Pope let him paint it in his own way. In fact, the Pope had hired five other skilled painters to come be Michelangelo’s helpers. Whenever they came to the chapel, though, they found the doors barred and locked. Eventually they gave up and went back home.

This is a common characteristic of many great artists. You can tell them what you want done, but don’t tell them how to do it. And they don’t want any help with their art.

Great designers operate the same way, because they are artists. Great designers are emotionally invested in their work, because good design IS art. Art with a purpose, yes, but art nonetheless. If you want to control the process of your web design, don’t hire an artist. Hire a run-of-the-mill graphic designer. There’s a place for that. Sometimes you just want someone who can execute your vision. But if you want something great, if you want a design that really makes a statement, then hire a great artist and then turn him or her loose.

Also, be sure to give really good directions up front. If your web design must incorporate photos of your store and management team, that is not something to stick in after the fact. Likewise, the time to rewrite the copy is before the design is started, not after it’s finished. If you commissioned a painting of a landscape, and then after it was done asked for a lake painted in the middle, you would lose the inspiration and the creativity. In the same way, a web design as a work of art needs clear parameters and then inspiration with freedom of movement. Otherwise, it becomes production work and not great art.

To your success!

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Michelangelo and Web Design

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.

Chinese Labor and Twitter Robots

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Have you seen the ads lately offering to get you traffic to your website? For only $5, you can get 50 people to click through to your website.

Really? It’s amazing how these people confuse cause and effect. Of course, if you want your website to SELL MORE and get you more customers, you need more visitors to the site. But the converse isn’t necessarily true. Just because you have visitors, doesn’t mean you’re going to make money.

Now, don’t confuse this with a quality pay per click program like Google AdWords or Facebook Link Click ads, where you can pay per visitor to get potential customers onto your website. I’m talking about the programs where you’re essentially paying people to visit your site.

Imagine a marketing consultant offering to help a struggling grocery store, whose “help” consists of hiring people off the street at $2 each to wander through the store. Do you think that will increase sales?

Believe it or not, most of the time the 50 people that you paid to visit your site are in fact robots programmed to look like website visitors and fool your traffic logs.

Bottom line: Many programs promising to deliver a specific amount of traffic to your website are at best a waste of money.

There are, however, many high quality SEO programs and search engine marketing programs that can make your website much more visible and bring your potential customers to your site. Feel free to invest in one of these. We’ve helped clients double, triple, and quadruple their sales with simple SEO programs.

The same thing is true for some of the programs that promise you 10,000 Twitter followers for an insanely low price. Many fake Twitter accounts are set up to auto-follow back anyone who follows them. So for only $500, their Twitter robot can get 10,000 inactive user accounts (i.e., robots) to auto-follow you back. You can look like a celebrity if you have lots of people “following” you, but what good is having 10,000 so-called “followers” if they don’t read your stuff?

Or the package where you buy 200 likes on Facebook. In reality, this only hurts your Facebook campaigns, because now with 200 fake profiles following you, your engagement scores go way down and then Facebook won’t show your content to your legitimate followers either.

Now, just to clarify, I’m not talking about a Facebook ad campaign where you’re getting potential customers to like your page. That can be really effective. I’m talking about a package where you’re buying a certain number of likes.

If you’re going to do a Facebook campaign, be sure you’re working with a legitimate marketer who’s reaching out to people that can become customers.

When you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, here’s another thing to watch out for. As many as a third of the user profiles on Facebook are fake accounts being run by robots. If you advertise to them, and they start following you, it could lower your engagement scores, which gets you into a vicious cycle of having to spend more and more money just to get your content seen by legitimate users. You want your campaign run by someone who is setting up a good target audience, to make sure you’re advertising to real people, and getting real people to engage and follow you.

Bottom line: Fake social media profiles can seriously hurt your marketing efforts.

There are many canned SEO programs that provide content for you to automatically post on your website. The theory is that Google likes content, so if you put fresh content on your site every day, then your website is going to rank really well.

The thing that these programs don’t tell you is that Google likes unique content. They like original content and quality content. What Google doesn’t like is content that’s been posted on 500 other websites. In fact, your website ranking can go down if you’re posting a content feed that’s used everywhere else. So many of these canned SEO programs can make your website look active, but they’re likely to hurt your search engine ranking and limit the number of potential customers who will find you. In the long run, it can reduce your traffic and sales.

So do yourself a favor if you’re investing in a program to help your social media presence, or to help your website increase its ranking, be sure you’re investing with a legitimate marketer who knows what they are doing and who uses a quality program to actually get you real content, real engagement and real results.

To your success!

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Chinese Labor and Twitter Robots