Why I want to teach you about online marketing

In this introductory video, Michael Byrd of WordwrightWeb in Wilmington explains why he wants to teach you about online marketing. It’s definitely something you can understand. You don’t have to be a geek. It’s not voodoo. And he’s tired of hearing how business owners have hired digital marketing firms and been burned by poor performance at a high cost. it doesn’t have to be this way.

Good morning. My name is Michael Byrd. My company is WordwrightWeb and we are in Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s us right back there. That’s our logo. We develop websites. We develop excellent websites, simple ones, complicated ones; we can do all of the application development and online web apps and so on. We also manage online marketing. And this is where we really make money for our customers. It’s great to have a website but, really, you want to do something with it. You want it to benefit your business, you want it to be an investment and get a great return on investment and not a cost.

I’m starting this series of videos to educate our marketplace and to talk about some of the aspects of website development and online marketing that I think people should know. And I’m really excited to start this series. We talked about different ways of doing it. We talked about webinars. We’ve done online newsletters and so on but I really like to talk about it because I talk about it a lot anyway. I talk about it in various groups that I’m in and I talk about it one-on-one with people. I’m excited about starting this series and to give this information to you all so anybody who wants to sign up it’s, of course, no charge. I’m also motivated by being irritated at what’s happening in the marketplace, what I run into.

I’m going to talk about the excitement first. I really am excited and I have used that word a lot already. It’s a cliché. It’s kind of a word that we pass over. I don’t like clichés. They are clichés for a reason but I think they’re worth examining and so I’m going to justify or attempt to justify why I’m excited. Simply, there is a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of intimidation or people being overwhelmed I should say with the prospect of online marketing and website development. It doesn’t have to be that way. When I explain it to people, to an individual, let’s say, in a stepwise fashion how it works, you can learn the fundamentals. You can learn the basics. It really is learnable it’s not something that takes a geek or a computer person. You don’t have to be a computer person. These are things that are conceptual that I can explain to you. I can do it in pencil and paper and show you pictures on the screen and so on. You can understand it. You don’t have to necessarily be able to execute it but you do need to understand it so you can be a good customer; you can be an informed customer of these kinds of services. You do need them if you want to run a business.

When I was younger – the analogy that I’ve come up with for these videos – when I was younger I was small and I was riding a tricycle I saw the bigger kids riding a bicycle and it just seemed impossible. I mean, they were doing it. Obviously there’s got to be a way to do it but how do you balance a bicycle on two wheels? But I learned how to do it and once I learned I realized is not that big of a deal. And you can learn it too. It really is kind of like that. Learn the basic steps.

The second thing: angry. I’m angry that online marketing is being sold as badly as it’s being sold today. There are major players – I’ll go into more detail about this in another video down the road – who sell with contracts and other such mumbo jumbo and if you don’t know any better you may think, “Well I’ve got to do something”. You don’t. It doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to get taken advantage of by people who sell online marketing. I don’t want you to be burned. I really don’t want you to be burned, I don’t want you to sign a contract and I don’t want you to be burned and I don’t want you to conclude that online marketing doesn’t work; that it’s too expensive. It doesn’t work if people have had that experience because they’ve gotten bad online marketing that they pay too much for, they’ve been locked in and didn’t know there was another way.

There is another way. Don’t get taken.

So that’s it for our introduction today. This is why I want to do these videos and why I’m really eager to get this information out to you.

My takeaway for today -I try to have a takeaway, an action step out of each one of these videos and my action step today is really a non action step. It’s a don’t do. Don’t sign a contract. Get eight weeks into our video series – I should say eight videos in. We’re going to do two a week so it should take you about five weeks – eight to ten videos – and you’ll realize why you don’t need to sign a contract. So somebody comes in or selling and they’ve got a deadline, You’ve got to get in here.” Don’t sign a contract. You will thank me five weeks from now. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Michael Byrd with Wordwright Web.