Fortes and Foibles

Sue, Conan and I had radically different ideas about constructing a website.  For that matter, we had radically different ideas about doing almost everything.

Somehow that actually made our company stronger, rather than tearing it apart.

It all boils down to agendas and fortes.  Each of us has a different forte which caused us to also have a different agenda.

Rather than making things easy, however, it can actually be painful.

It's even more painful when you are building a website and you are not aware of what these three agendas are.

If you are not aware of the three agendas, it's hard to keep them in balance when building a website.

1. The Technical Agenda: (high rankings, algorithms and server side issues.)
   
   
2. The Direct Response Agenda: (getting your prospects turned into customers and responding to your offer.)
   
3. The Educational Agenda: (educating and providing the most useful information on the internet about a keyword, product, or service.)

The most common error made when a person decides to build a website (or hire someone to do it) is that they misunderstand the difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and direct response marketing.

The result of this error is an ongoing struggle between the technical department and the marketing department of your brain. (Even if you are a one man business, there is still a struggle for your personal time.)

While your organization is arguing internally, your customers suffer because they are not given enough educational material in which to overcome their online “confidence gap.”

In the end you suffer, because you lose potential customers who are looking for free information and who require a longer educational process.

Additionally, many business owners do not know how to decide which agenda to focus on first.

Summary of Pain # 10:

Struggling to integrate these three different agendas while not really understanding them was painful to me AND to my customers!