The Fundamentals Don’t Change
If you’ve delved into online business for more than a few weeks, you’ll probably be tempted to think that the industry moves really quickly. There’s always a new “best method for ranking in Google” or a new “hack for social media” or whatever. There’s always the next best trend which is going to be worth billions or the next global catastrophe that you have to stock up on gold and ammo for.
There’s some truth to those things for the most part.
However, there’s another truth. I’ll talk about that in this semi-rant article.
The Business World And Tech Worlds Change Rapidly
I haven’t been involved in freelance writing long. I’ve been involved in online business slightly longer. I built my first-ever website quite a long time ago now though.
Even though I’m hardly an old-timer, something I’ve been around long enough to notice is that certain aspects of business/writing/freelancing/internet marketing change very quickly.
For instance, two years ago there was a massive great boost in the amount of people talking about juicing. Overnight I had a ton of business writing about juicing recipes, reviewing juicers and writing about the benefit of juicing. It was a trend. Now, that business has died down. It’s rare that I’ll have people coming to me asking for juicing stuff.
That’s a subject. Technology has changed more.
With things like WordPress, it’s only a matter of time before the trickiest things get processed and turned into plugins. For some projects, I’ve used Thrive Content Builder. It’s a drag-and-drop website design plugin that allows you to create a ton of different page templates. A couple of years ago, this sort of thing didn’t exist and WordPress was clunky for any sort of design stuff.
The social networks that an internet marketer works on will change constantly. The traffic sources will change constantly. The technology you’ll use will change significantly and the subjects you write about will change.
For a long time, this got me down. I remember when some Google update happened once and my traffic (on another site) dropped down to practically nothing overnight. I thought it’d be impossible to work in the online space because it was impossible to know when that next big update would be coming.
Luckily, there’s a silver lining to that cloud.
The Fundamentals Don’t Change
I imagine there were a ton of marketers who got really upset at the advent of the internet. Print media had a virtual monopoly on advertising for a long time, and after that it only had to compete with radio and television. Even then, the cost was prohibitive for the everyman to start up.
Along comes the internet though, and suddenly people don’t have to wait to be advertised to. They could buy stuff of their own choosing. If people could do this, then surely marketing would end?
A lot of marketers probably lost their jobs and probably continue to lose their jobs.
However, good marketers jumped on the opportunity. After all, what worked in print media basically works on the internet.
Good copywriting is the art of persuading people to buy stuff through words. That’s true whether it’s an advert in a magazine, a TV ad or a blog post.
The media changes. The traffic source changes. Today it’s Instagram and yesterday it was Twitter and tomorrow it’ll be something new. Take a look at Pokémon Go. People are going crazy looking for animals that aren’t there. How long will it be before we’re seeing ads that aren’t there?
If you’re a good advertiser/marketer/copywriter, then the traffic source doesn’t matter. It’s just a new place to create a campaign for. The fundamentals don’t change; you’re still creating interest, desire and action in all of your marketing material.
Why I Recommend Handwriting, Boring Practice Routines And Actually Putting Hours In
The Four-Hour Work Week and lifestyle gurus sell a pretty future. Their idea of “hacking the system” and finding that one thing that gives you a ton of money for little work is a great fantasy.
However, whatever the “hack” is, eventually it’ll run out. When I do my freelance work, I see the would-be business hackers move from one great thing to the next. Forum spamming, Scrapebox, ketones, growth-hacking, networking with influencers; I’ve written a ton of articles about each fad, and every single one of the people who hire me are asking for exactly the same thing. It’s just a case of who does it first and who gets in before the door closes or the game changes.
However
The fundamentals don’t change. It’s really boring to spend an hour a day copying out adverts by hand. If you’re like me, it’ll also be physically uncomfortable and your hands will ache from holding a pen.
It’s even more mind-numbing to take the specific bits of copywriting that you’re no good at and add them to a daily routine. I’m not a natural at calls-to-action, so spending time on them isn’t comfortable.
But it works. It’s the same as writing a thousand words a day or whatever mechanical benchmark you set yourself.
The important thing is that if you get these skills, it doesn’t matter what the current trend is. If the current trend is Pokémon, then if you’ve hammered the fundamentals, it doesn’t matter. If the trend changes tomorrow and everyone wants to know about the next Justin Bieber, then that won’t bother you either.
Also, if you ever find you’re getting lost with what to do, or your words aren’t as effective as they once were, if you’ve mastered the fundamentals of copywriting once before, you’ll know how to go back and do it again! This isn’t true of finding a hack for the latest Google algorithm or whatever.
Final Thoughts
This is a bit of a rambling article. I’ll summarise in a few points:
- The fundamentals of business don’t ever change. Find target audience, create solution to their problem, convince them that the solution works
- The technicalities and window-dressing do change, and change frequently. People want different solutions and different novelties all the time.
- You should focus on building the skills to achieve the first, and only spend a miniscule amount on the second.
Further to that, here are some fundamentals:
- Sales: Find audience with need. Provide them the means to fill that need.
- Advertising: Exposing audience to the solution to their problems.
- Marketing: Converting the audience into customers.
- Copywriting: The act of doing all of these things through the written word.
Providing you build yourself a framework by which you take care of those universal things, you’ll find that applying them to particular trends, traffic sources or systems isn’t too difficult.