Wasting your efforts on marketing

Solid marketing can do wonderful things for your business, but it can be easy to get distracted and waste your time.

Similar to my recent post “ Can you speed it up?”, people can often do things in marketing that have the opposite of the intended effect. In the book “ Trying Not To Try “, the author shares a thought from Chinese philosopher Mecius:

“In the state of Song there was a man who, worried because his sprouts of grain were not growing fast enough, decided to go out to his field and pull on them. Without any idea of what he’d done, he returned home and announced to his family, ‘I am really exhausted today, I’ve been out in the fields helping the sprouts to grow!’ Alarmed, his sons rushed out to the fields to take a look and saw that all the sprouts had shriveled and died.” This episode is the basis of a modern Chinese saying, “pulling on the sprouts to help them grow,” which refers to any effort that has thoroughly counterproductive results.

In the world of marketing I see this come up in a few ways:

• People clicking their own results in the search engine to try to rank better.
• People buying keyword-rich domain names (like high-quality-dress-shirts.com) and redirecting them to their site to help with ranking.