Don’t worry; I haven’t lost my mind.

I’m not recommending you go rogue with your business either.

(Well, not entirely.)

Best practices are still important.

Good customer service is still important.

Having a strategy for all your online marketing efforts is still important.

But what’s not important is following along with every.single.thing that Everyone says you are *supposed to* do.

Everyone will tell you a whole lot of things if you give him or her the time of day.

And it’s all those things that can wear you down and make you crazy.

As a small business owner, you already have enough to wear you down and make you crazy, so let’s purposely lighten our loads a bit, shall we?

Everyone often has very sound advice, but there is no substitute for knowing what works best for you and your business, following your gut feeling, or making a point to take a big picture approach as a solid double-check that how you are approaching your small business makes sense.

Let me give you an example about us: We have a newsletter subscriber list that we do nothing with.

(GASP, right?)

Here’s another example: Although we regularly run ads for our clients, we’ve only ever run paid social campaigns for our business as a way to test out various social media ad products. Paid ads are not otherwise part of our marketing plan.

And here’s one more: We only added a contact form to our site about 8 months ago (we’ve always listed our email address and phone number, though).

We know that you are *supposed to* nurture your email subscriber list and use that to sell your products or services. We know that we *should* pay money to run Facebook campaigns that would drive more LIKEs and increase our fan base to some more-impressive number. We know that we are *supposed to* have always used a contact form as a way to collect leads and email addresses of prospective customers.

So why – with these supposed tos and shoulds – would we choose to ignore these industry-standard practices?

Because the other online marketing activities that we are and have always been doing have always worked very well for us. Where we’ve put our focus is not what’s typical for our industry, but it makes sense to us from a big picture level as well as making sense to us when we consider what our customers would like to see, read, and experience from a firm like ours.

Our focus is on things like blogging and SEO. Those two things are where we’ve chosen to put our investment (of time). Those methods work for us on a day-to-day implementation level, as well as on a client acquisition level.

So while all the things we don’t do are actually tried and true practices, the online marketing activities we’ve chosen to implement are tried and true practices as well. Ultimately, those chosen practices are a better fit for us and our business.

When you are deciding where to focus your time, energy and money, do consider all the directions you could go, but then choose only the ones that are the best fit for you and your business.

(P.S. Of the 3 contact options – phone call, email, and contact form, we get the fewest inquiries via the contact form!)