Have you ever noticed that...

I was wondering if someone ever noticed that your business competitors receive more clients just because they focus a lot on sales and marketing, when the quality and specs (let's state this as a fact) of their actual services/products is worse than that of yours? What is the possible cause of such a situation? Raging capitalism? Inability of the clients to comprehend what's better instead just listening to someone who shouts louder? Just few thoughts.

Instead of worrying about what your clients are doing, step up your own marketing Vykintas. Then you have the dream combination of the product and service that you know is brilliant, plus a marketing machine to make sure that clients know about it.

Its luck & I've found that the more people I talk to the luckier I get!

Vyk

Maybe your competitors listen to their clients and give them what they ask for instead of telling them what they should have. Clients generally know what they want and don't like being patronised. Not saying you do this, but you did ask.

What I meant is that clients get worse quality, because those businesses who spend a lot of resources on sales and marketing are forced to cut back on the quality of their products/services. This is like physics - energy doesn't appear out or nowhere and does not disappear either, miracles don't happen. And some wise man once said, that middle ages are by far not over - people still listen to someone who shouts standing on the barrel.

So, do something about it, and market your products/services.

To tell the truth in my first post I tried to be abstract, talk more about tendencies and not specifically about myself. However, to do what I do is extremely time consuming, not even mentioning that I have to constantly update my skills, otherwise I'd be out in no time. It leaves not much time for sales/marketing. Besides, in the way I think that services/products should market themselves, quality being the edge of the "campaign", but that probably happens only in fairytales, since we live in the world ruled by propaganda.

We live in the world. So do what is necessary to make your business a success.

Vyk

Put some effort into a Blatant Ad. Don't spend too much time trying to be everything just target a specific item and let people absorb your skill one step at a time.

Selling and marketing yourself should be an ongoing process, its not necessary to do it all yourself there are plenty of people on here that will sell your skills for you [ we call it selling htrough the room] talk to Stefan [above] he knows what he is doing and can get you started.

Stefan , he needs your skills...

That's ok, I have an idea that I will try to post on monday (on weekends most of the people tend to divert their focus from business).

Vyk I have to be blunt here, but please don't take offence.

I went to your website to read more about you. On the home page there are 4 graphics arranged as a jigsaw. Three of those do not link anywhere and my natural inclination was to use them. So I turned to your Portfolio section in the menu bar. In there are two further graphics leading to two projects. One worked OK, (although the site is a very unattractive brown colour) but the second says "This project is currently suspended", but I clicked on it anyway. I then got the slowest flash loading page I've seen and gave up waiting.

If you're trying to gain business and believe you're better than the competition then you have to be. This means your website (you're a web developer right?) should be the best it can be. No slow loading, no dead links. If you argue that the graphics aren't meant to be links then this would show a lack of understanding about how people use websites (and once again, you're a web developer, right?)

Lastly, there are grammatical and spelling mistakes on your site. I'm not going to try and sell you my services because Stef does this too, but if you want your site to be error-free you may want to get someone like one of us to look at the copy on the site to at least tidy it up.

Sorry to hit you over the head with it, but there is much more to a great website than fancy graphics, particularly when they don't work.

That's ok, my site is a bit of a mess, because I always keep changing it (that's why some images are not active links at the moment), that's the way of a web designer/developer. The "slowest loading flash page" contains heavy 3D animation - it's impossible to make it smaller. Not everything on the web weighs 10 kb, there are people with decent broadband connections. Another thing, unfortunately everything is hosted in US (for the moment), hence slow loading. Content text, well, it's not really a concern of a web designer/developer, wouldn't you agree? It was only meant to relay my information, that's it, I wasn't trying to make a psalm out of it.

P.S. Not everyone agrees, that every single item on the web page should be clickable, however when the client asks for it I have no problem with that. By the way, the layout of your website breaks up completely in Opera ;)

"Untitled Document" Vykintas. Not good.

It's untitled because it's unfinished (because of technical limitations of Flash). It was only meant to be a show project anyway. Besides, you guys work with titles, I work with code ;)