SWIFT MUGSY

Hope for the Future of Online Presence

When last we spoke, I waxed positively poetic about the impending doom that is our online presence. Authentic businesses – especially of the small variety – are at a huge disadvantage against the growing threat of bot activity, AI abuse, and losing crucial visibility. This is a major point of concern for me – both for the obvious reasons here and also for my other endeavors – so I spend a lot of time researching and looking at all kinds of potential solutions. My answers may surprise you! (obligatory internet clickbait statement)

Shifting Our Focus

We’ve come to rely on the internet for all the glorious things that it promised: creating community, reaching patrons, and making customers. If we’re not selling anything, we’re not able to pay for anything, and then, what are we even doing this for? No matter how we break it down, in the end, the purpose of everything we do is to conduct business. Now, we want to conduct that business in fair and ethical ways, of course, and that’s where the internet has kind of betrayed us.

Back in the Early Days, having an online presence at all was the pinnacle of sophistication. If you had a website and you had an email address with your own domain, then you were legit. Now… that’s just standard, bare-minimum credibility, and even at that, it can end up looking like a trap. The rules of what counts as good content or good design change constantly (RIP, Dancing Banana) but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Every time you update your website, every time you change your WordPress theme, the Almighty Algo notices and gives you a little boost. (Don’t get greedy, it only works periodically. How often? Check some astrological charts for the best answer there.)

As I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we’ve become dependent on our online presence, and I’m thinking that to battle the bots and thieves, we gotta start kickin’ it old school. I’m talkin’ printed flyers, brochures, in-person signage that speaks to the hearts of your loyal customers. I’m talkin’ bringing the nature of your products and services into the real world and driving your energy towards creating experiences in the meatspace.

Of course, we still have to use the internet for a lot of that because that’s just how our society is shaped now, but why we’re doing it and how we’re getting there can change.

Leverage Your Existing Online Presence

Make sure that you are engaging with your audience, and on social media accounts, encourage them to “favorite” your feed wherever possible. Remember in my last post that I talked about how that core community had high engagement. If you keep doing that and putting your most friendliest, excitingest face forward (or whatever is working for you), you’ll get organic growth and reach when friends tell friends who tell friends.

Sure, yes, you want to extend your reach and grow your audience, but the best way to do that is to take care of the audience you already have. Give them reasons to seek you out, to recommend you to friends, to come back for more. Sometimes it’s your free value-adds like stickers in every package, sometimes it’s repeat-client discounts. Don’t give away the farm to every guy that buys a thing, but make sure that your customers know you value them – and let that be part of your online conversation.

Another really good way to get to your core people is to go back to using newsletters and collecting mailing lists. If you have an awesome webhost that can set up a newsletter email for you, you don’t even have to pay for an extra SMTP add-on to send out those letters. Don’t try to flood your audience with content like this, though: there are rules for what kind of content and how often to send that’ll keep your newsletters off of blocklists.

What’s the fantastic thing? That depends on your situation, so you might need to read some entrails to figure it out, but there are some good guidelines:

• Make sure you are sending out an authentic and honest conversational piece. Don’t try to make your newsletters sound like marketing pitches: all selling is just a conversation.
• Don’t be afraid to talk about your products or your classes or your events, but imagine that you’re telling your best friend about it. What makes you excited about this thing? What’s delightful about that location?
• Including a call to action is required. You have to have a link to your website or to your product or to your tickets or wherever. No one is reading an email about your business and pretending that it’s not about your business.

Meatspace to Cyberspace and Vice Versa

Email lists are solid gold. Never forget that. There are brands that no one’s ever heard of that don’t need to pay thousands to advertise because they have a rock-solid, loyal-to-the-bone email list audience. Collect those addresses when you’re in person and when you’re online. Send people directly to the signup page, and then make that effort pay off by giving them something fantastic!

Likewise, consider how viable sending out postal packages might be. Depending on the size of your audience, you could personalize postcards or send out birthday or holiday cards. I’ve watched people in the textile arts use these postal mailing lists as rewards for sales, and it almost always leads to more sales. On that note, don’t collect or use physical addresses until after you’ve shipped something to them! And, make sure your customers know that you might be sending them a little somethin’-somethin’ via post sometime. There’s nothing more disconcerting than getting a letter in the mail – especially a handwritten one – that you weren’t expecting.

(Man, I miss having pen pals…)

Before the internet, people advertised their businesses through local adverts in newspapers, flyers left on community boards, adverts on the radio, or just plain word of mouth. Sure, there were billboards (not legal in every state) or television commercials or big inflatable gorillas, but that’s just not possible for the average business owner anymore. Firstly, there isn’t enough real estate to answer to the needs of the thousands of businesses that exist in any given area, and second, those aren’t really useful to specialized audiences.

It’s easy to feel let down by the promises of the internet, especially since the G word dumped its “don’t be evil” motto, but that just means we have to get back to doing things the old fashioned way.

One leg at a time, like everyone else.