Feel good marketing is like a cancer that eats away and destroys your online business before it even has a chance at survival.

What is Feel Good Marketing Disease?

Feel Good Marketing is just a name I came up with to describe a type of marketing strategy that many online businesses and Blogs use and almost all are not even aware they are using it.

I’m not immune to this marketing disease either, having been affected by its destructive nature in the past as well.  What’s exciting is that as with most diseases, it can be beaten if we simply understand it and take steps to eliminate it from our lives and businesses.

So what kind of marketing disease am I talking about here?

Well, let’s start with the symptoms of this disease.  Here are a few of the symptoms of Feel Good Marketing Disease:

• Little to no targeted traffic coming to your website
• Huge amounts of energy, time and resources spent on your website, content, graphics, etc., but very little payoff
• The majority of your daily traffic comes from you visiting your own website multiple times a day
• Low or non-existent conversions on your site
• Little or no income produced from your website
• Do any of these sound familiar?  If so, you could have Feel Good Marketing Disease.

What Does Feel Good Marketing Disease Do?

Feel Good Marketing Disease infects the brains of entrepreneurs and blocks any and all common sense they may have related to the marketing efforts of their business.

Instead, the disease causes entrepreneurs to believe that the purpose of their marketing efforts is not to actually market their business in any way, but rather to make them feel good.  Feel Good Marketing Disease also creates a huge mental imbalance in the entrepreneurs brain which creates intense apathy towards marketing efforts and massively reduces the value entrepreneurs place on marketing efforts.

As an example, while a healthy entrepreneur not infected with Feel Good Marketing Disease may allocate 10% – 20% of their businesses operating budget towards ongoing marketing efforts, entrepreneurs infected with Feel Good Marketing Disease spend 1% or less of their operating budgets on marketing efforts and in a lot of cases the actual amount spent is closer to 0%.

Let’s Get Serious

Ok, let’s get serious.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, there is no actual condition called Feel Good Marketing Disease.  You can’t go to a doctor and get diagnosed for it, and there are no pills you can take to get rid of it.

Feel Good Marketing Disease is just a label I created to get a point across.  I actually think it *is* a disease, it’s just not a health-related disease, but rather a business-related disease.

At the root of this disease is an idea.  The idea is simply this – “If you create a good product or service, it will market itself.”

Honestly, that is a pile of crap.

Every business needs to value marketing.  In a good business model, at least 10-20% of your operating budget should be going to marketing your business.

What that means is that if you want your business to be making $5,000/month, you need to be prepared to spend at least $500 – $1,000/month on marketing.

The same thing should be done with your time.  If you’re a Blogger for example, for every 10 hours you spend working on your Blog, 1-2 of those hours should be spent on marketing efforts.

Now, here’s where things get tricky.

You *must* focus your efforts on *real* marketing, and not Feel Good Marketing.

Feel Good Marketing is anything that you do, which you label as “marketing”, but which actually produces little to no actual marketing benefits to your business but simply just makes you feel good for doing something.

When you were a kid, do you remember having a Sports Day in elementary school, or something similar to it?

In my school we had Sports Day and during Sports Day the teachers separated all the kids into four groups and assigned each group a color (green, blue, red, yellow).  Each of the four colors then competed during sports day for points.  Each event was worth a certain number of points and you were competing to win for your team color.

At the end of the day the teachers gave out ribbons for each student depending on the place each group won in the competition.  The first place group got the first place ribbon, second place got second place, third place go third, fourth place got fourth.  Honestly it didn’t really matter how well you did because at the end of the day, each kid went home with a ribbon and when they showed it to their parents their parents probably said “Oh wow, 3^rd place, good job!” and displayed the ribbon proudly on the fridge.

Some schools even skip the rankings and just give everyone a ribbon that says “Participant”.

Well, unfortunately, we’re not 8 years old anymore and in the business world simply being a “participant” in the marketing game isn’t good enough.

Your marketing has to be focused on winning, and not just participating.

This is a mistake I see so many entrepreneurs making – and it’s a mistake I made myself many times before as well.

When it comes to your marketing efforts, you need to focus all your energy on winning the marketing game for whatever specific target market you’re going after.

It is not good enough to just be a participant.  You must win.  If you don’t win, you lose, it’s as simple as that.

The good news is that it’s not that hard to win in the marketing game, but you do need to use some common sense and apply some effort and energy into your marketing efforts.

The Power of Focus in Marketing

Focus is a huge part of a successful marketing strategy.

Let’s use Blogging as an example.  Read the following point a few times until it really sinks in:

It is better to write one blog post that is the best written and marketed post on a specific topic, than it is to write 1,000 good quality blog posts and apply a mediocre marketing strategy to them.

Writing Blog posts without a good marketing strategy is pointless.  You can write 1,000 blog posts, and without marketing you will still make $0/m from your Blog.

The trick to winning in marketing is to focus your efforts.

Instead of writing dozens and dozens of Blog posts, and having those Blog posts rank between #20-#200 in the Google rankings for example, it’s better to write just ONE Blog post and promote it until it is ranked in the Top 10 on Google.

Here’s why.

When it comes to Google rankings, statistically speaking the vast majority of traffic from a specific search will come from the Top 10 results given by Google.   Meaning, 99% of people never go past the first page of Google.

So, a Blog post ranked #2 for a decent keyword could get draw in 10,000 visitors to your site in a month, but the exact same blog post which is ranked #11 could only bring in 20 visitors per month or less.

Do you see the huge difference between the two?  The scale is not linear.  In fact, if that same Blog post could move up to the #1 spot it could potentially get 25,000 – 30,000 visitors per month just by moving up one rank.

So, if you write 1,000 Blog posts and they are all showing up in the 2^nd or 3^rd or 10^th page of Google, then nobody will ever find them!  So all that effort you made writing those posts is largely wasted.

You are much better off just targeting one keyword with one post or multiple posts and focusing all your energy on that one keyword until you dominate for that one search term.

This isn’t just for Bloggers either.

For any website out there, you need to be very clear on who you’re targeting and then position yourself to be the #1 or #2 person for that target market.

If you’re running a Vegetarian Cooking Blog for example, it could be a thousand times more effective to become the #1 resource for “Spicy Guacamole Recipes” than it is to be #200 for “Vegetarian Cooking”.

Follow?

The trick is to create marketing targets for yourself which you can win and then dominate that target, instead of just “participating” in the market in general.

Start thinking in these terms…

“I am the #1 business in the world for _______________”

I don’t care if you fill in the blank in there with “pink leather couch pillows” or “business mentoring for pregnant women”.  It is better to dominate the #1 spot for a small niche than to be a “participant” in a much bigger niche.

Always target your products and services to the niches which you can dominate.  Even if your Blog is a multi-topic Blog like this one, and you aren’t really targeting anyone specifically with the entire Blog you can always use individual Blog posts or pages or sections of your website to target specific markets.

Don’t just create content, or put up a site advertising your services or products and then devote 5 minutes to marketing and expect to win.  Taking a “good enough” approach to marketing will kill your business.

If you don’t know how to do marketing, admit it.  Hire some help.  Find a mentor.  Read some books.  Take some courses.  Learn to be a good marketer or hire it out to someone else, but don’t ignore marketing.  Unless you don’t like your business and want to see it fail.

Remember this very important fact:

A properly designed and implemented marketing strategy should produce a Return on Investment.

What this means is that a proper marketing strategy should put MORE money into you business than you invest in it.

Meaning, if you spend $1,000 in marketing, it should make you at least $1,001 in profit, otherwise your marketing is running at a loss.  Most crappy marketing strategies do run at a loss which is why people don’t like marketing.

Let me ask you this.  If you had a marketing strategy which put $100 in your pocket for every $50 you spent on the marketing strategy, how much money would you be willing to invest into your marketing?

Also, if you had a marketing strategy that put $100 in your pocket for every 30-60m of energy you or someone working for you devoted to it, how much time would you devote to marketing?

I’m sure you’d agree that with these kinds of marketing strategies, it’s a no brainer to invest as much as possible money and energy into your marketing efforts.  The challenge is that most people don’t know how to create marketing strategies that work this way and that is because they are typically using Feel Good Marketing which doesn’t actually produce any ROI.  The only thing Feel Good Marketing does is make you feel good inside (temporarily)!

When you hear people saying “I will show you a simple and easy marketing strategy that you’re going to love!” you should be asking yourself “Does this marketing strategy produce the result I’m after?”

Honestly, who cares if it’s easy?  Who cares if it’s simple?  Who cares if you love the marketing strategy or not?

The only thing that matters is whether or not it’s working.

Does your marketing strategy actually work?

Or are you just slapping together a half-assed effort into your marketing and then wondering why your business isn’t growing?

Don’t let Feel Good Marketing Disease ruin your online business