A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be the editor of a golf instruction book by an ex-PGA player. (The book had a short run and is out of print as the world really doesn’t need more golf books…) But the parallels between learning to play golf and learning digital marketing are worth comparing. Both leave you throwing things, turn your brain to pudding, and cost you a few hundred (or thousand) dollars to suck in new ways. Golf tips and content marketing tips are spewed out by professionals and charlatans alike who hawk their wares by offering free advice. Both golf and content marketing are insanely difficult to master–and yet when you watch the pros it seems effortless.
You suck at something. So you decide to learn how to do it, or how to do it better. You still suck at it. So you read more. If you were learning to play golf you would take a lesson, practice, read some tips, and practice some more. If you went to a website and signed up for the newsletter you’d start getting daily tips pumped at you from at least a dozen different styles on how to swing, putt, chip, fade, cure that slice, etc. The result is often the player standing at the tee–completely frozen by the mental anguish of trying to remember all the tips and put them into the right sequence.
In the world of digital marketing, you sign up for how-to newsletters and content marketing tips. You decide that a 30-day free trial of the latest Twitter analytics tool is a good idea. You follow the experts and their Tweets about how they do it. You read the headlines that pop up in your inbox by the hundreds, followed by the webinar invites on amping up your social ROI, and the events on social selling thru marketing automation, and the content marketing conferences, and whitepapers on how to write whitepapers until…..
You want advice on what to do? No. You don’t. Trust me.