Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome For Website Success

Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome For A Successful Website
Photo by Sun Dazed

Shiny Object Syndrome (S.O.S.) is a disease that can infect many small business owners or marketing managers in charge of a company’s website. You hear of a new technology or service and immediately need to have it incorporated to your online marketing strategy. Before doing any research or asking “does this help me achieve my goals better?”, you just want to show off that you are using the coolest new widget for your business.

S.O.S. Is A Never Ending Road

Unfortunately, jumping around from tool to tool like this will lead you no where. If you had directions to get to your destination but kept jumping routes, don’t you think it would take you a lot longer to get there? It’s the same thing with achieving success online.

Your website should be built with a strategy in mind and your online marketing should have a short, medium and long term plan. Without patience and consistency to see things through, you won’t realize the full potential of how the web can help your business grow.

SEO strategies, for instance, take months to show any kind of growth. But the benefits of being in the top three search results for your target keywords can be exponential. Unfortunately, many businesses bail on SEO and content marketing before giving it a chance to come to fruition. When you plant the seeds of content marketing, you need to nourish them and give them time to flourish. Then you will reap the rewards of brand awareness, targeted traffic, quality visitors and thought leadership in your industry.

Social media strategies take time as well. You can’t expect to create a business page on Facebook and have 10,000 Likes the next day (week or month for that matter). The same goes for Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or any other social media channel. It takes time to build a community around your brand or rise to the top of voices in an existing online community.

Without staying the course of your online strategy, don’t expect to achieve success. Unless your goal is to dabble in as many different areas as you can. But unless your writing reviews for these online tools, I doubt that’s the case.

Don’t worry about what’s new and full of hype every day, because every day there will be something new. These different online tools are just that, tools. Your success relies on your goals, tactics, strategies and how you can tackle your action items most efficiently. Going through a new learning curve for every new Twitter tool or Facebook app will leave you running in place on the path to success.