Fledgling Internet marketers often make things way too complicated. I’ve seen lots of questions lately taking one basic premise (build a site with content about your niche) and they really over-complicate things. You know the type – the risk averse “I have to get this right on the first shot” type.
I was one of those early on when learning to play the piano. I would get halfway through the 2nd or 3rd line of a piece and miss a note. I’d have to stop and go back to the very beginning of the piece and start all over again. Once I got to the complicated section and messed it up, I’d go back to the beginning again. Eventually I got frustrated, slammed my hands on the keys, and walked away in a huff.
Once I got to playing sports, there was no time to stop and reset if you made a mistake – you had to just roll with it and keep on going. If you really screwed up on a play, you hustled to recover – and you learned.
My band director at the time also instilled the same philosophy in me. When you’re performing, you can’t stop and go back, so you just have to suck it up and keep on going. During practice, you work on the few difficult bars and go on.
So, what does this have to do with marketing on the Internet?
Too many people are like me learning the piano. They are so focused on getting it right the first time, that they don’t allow for screwups or learning. If you’re so afraid to make a post or launch a site that you’re sweating out the internal linking structure before you’ve even registered for your domain, then I’m sorry – you need to shelve those dreams of blogging in your underwear and stick to the 9-5.
Use your creativity and experiment, however, and there’s a lot you can do. Here’s an example that I saw in a forum recently:
The person is writing up a strategy / tips guide for a video game. They have URLs for all of the different characters mapped out and he’s waffling between having pages on the site about each character, or pushing those off to article and web2.0 sites to point back to the product sales page. There is also a concern that by having information about the characters the value in the guide (special moves, etc) would be lost.
Using a little creative thinking, you can do it all. Here’s a simple way how:
Johnny Cage has a backstory
Now, rewrite that a couple of times and you’ve got extra content to push out to article or web2.0 sites.
That’s just the beginning of what you can do. All of these games have some sort of backstory. Mine that backstory, use your creativity, and suddenly you have an authority site on that game.