We are our own customers. I have always found it easier to apply the things we preach while working on the project of a customer. Right now it applies to the BrandBarn website.
We registered the site, pretending to be our own customer, and put up a holding page to tell people, “We are coming soon”. Two months later and we got so busy with client projects that we never got around to building our own site. Personally, we should be ashamed, but in a certain sense, you also count your blessings when you are too busy with work for customers.
Luckily it is December and we can now sit down and put the proverbial pen to paper and tell you about our company and the services we provide. We can apply all the SEO magic we believe in and talk about it in plain English. I believe in explaining things in plain English and I believe in drawing pictures if it helps explaining concepts. People are not stupid. We have however reached a phase in business where we have a crap load of abbreviations and terms to describe simple concepts. The language we use makes it easier for us to talk to our peers in meetings and serves as shorthand communication. There is, however, a problem when we sit in front of customers and expect them to understand the lingo.
You do get clients who call you out on it and ask you to be more specific on what you are actually delivering, but you also get clients who do not ask you because they do not want to come across as stupid. The great thing is that when I sit in front of new clients I confess upfront that I am stupid. It would be presumptuous to assume I know their business and have a full grasp of their abbreviations and industry terms. So I ask questions to avoid delivering something stupid in the future.
Today we are treating ourselves as the client and we are acting stupid as we fill our site with content. We are spending extra time on explaining to ourselves what we do in simple plain English.
Maybe we impress ourselves enough to win our own contract.
