Maybe It's Me

Maybe its me.

I have been immersed for two days in email marketing, blog marketing, twitter and facebook marketing. Been up to my eyeballs in SEO, auto responders, linkages, and cross optimization. It's all great stuff. It's all good information and learning how to do it is absolutely essential for all of us. Or if we choose not to do it, to know what we want so we can hire someone to do it for us. No doubt it is a TACTIC that has become omnipresent.

Tactics are what we all love. We spend oodles of time on checking copy, art work, types of paper, music, scripts, web design, email templates, etc. etc. etc. And we love very minute of it because we can touch it and see it and hear it. Sometimes we even feel it and taste it.

It's the other stuff, before we get to the tactics, that we may be ignoring; its a 2 step process;

1. Approach: are you domineering or bossy or even authoritative. Or are you subservient, non confrontational? Do you get a lot of input from books? Do you test your gut and set up cells for that purpose? Are you ever wrong or do you ever admit it? Is your approach or rather your style a fundamental building block to the business you are in or contemplating? Choose a bad style and all the great tactics in the world go away.

Ever have someone say, "Man, this is a great business if it wasn't for the stupid customers." Now there's someone who will be on life support pretty damn soon!

2. Attitude: some people think this is the most important aspect of the plan because it indicates why you started the business, what you want from it, what kind of people you will hire and how you treat them both as employees and as people. it asks the fundamental question, "why are you doing this at all...besides the money?"

If we dance around these two building blocks and never reach a viable strategy, all the slick tricks, meta tags, embedded codes, auto responders, e-mails, templates and copy points, (with benefits and guarantees), will be merely window dressing if the direction we plotted is just plain wrong.

Translation: Mess up your attitude and approach and even the best tactics will fail, and fail badly.

When was the last time you had a strategy check up?