In the famous play Death of a Salesman the main character Willie Loman spends most of his time dreaming about how things used to be and how he wished things were. But Willie never took the action necessary to improve his way of life. Willie was hanging on to the past and not willing to embrace the future.
I can relate to Willie Loman. As a marketing director and consultant for many well known speakers, I was like many of them: I crossed my fingers, hoping the internet would just go away. I did not want to know anything about pay per click, search engine optimization, banners ads or web 2.0. Social media I thought was an unmentionable disease that you definitely did not want to catch.
When I worked on marketing campaigns for a speakers I just simply hired the best web guy, the best ad copy writers and said tell me what you need from me and I will get it for you. But as fate would have it a couple years ago I ended up working for an IT company that provided internet solutions for government and industry. The company saved government a ton of time and money on their purchasing and helped distribution companies increase sales volume and gain market share. Something happened when I was working for that IT company, while talking with clients I had one of those aha moments … the internet is IT! The internet IS marketing’s final frontier. So I decided to bite the bullet, and at 52 years of age, I went to school for internet marketing.
Years ago I told speakers “a website will never sell a speaking gig, only a killer video will ever sell your speaking business”….however just a few years later, speakers were getting business from the internet in fact some of the speakers I managed were getting business from their websites…a lot of business.
A number of years ago a friend told me the internet was the real estate of the future and he who owned the most real estate got to be king of the universe. Well the future is here NOW! IF you are not capitalizing on search engine optimization and key word phrases you are probably losing a ton of speaking business.
Many small businesses feel they have it all covered because they have a website and they had someone enter Meta tags. 10 years ago it was all about Meta tags. Like Willie Loman’s good old days, Meta tags are now ancient history. Today it is learning how to utilize keyword phrases and how to use those phrases to optimize your website. Learning how to compete in a world gone web can at first appear to be a daunting task. However with a little knowledge a website can easily be optimized to bring in a ton more speaking business.
If you’d like to hear more about optimizing your website to bring in more business email me and I will do a custom report on your business.
