When I am qualifying whether someone is qualified to do business with HubSpot, I ask them how much time they will have to dedicate to their online marketing, specifically to creating content.

They are usually the same people that think SEO stops when you tweak your title tags. Actually, they usually think it's about tweaking "meta tags", which we all know is not that critical anymore.

They usually ask what would I need time to do? So, I say, "To really succeed at online marketing, especially SEO, you need to create content. The more pages you have on your site, the more keywords you can target. The more keywords you can target, the more traffic you can get from search engines. Also, when you create great content, people are compelled to link to it. Links increase your search rankings and send direct traffic."

Then, I ask, depending on how difficult it is to rank for their keywords and how much traffic they need to generate to hit their lead and sales generation goals, "Do you have x hours/week to dedicate to writing content?" where x is usually 2-10 hours.

About 1/3rd of the people I speak with, say something like, "I Don't Have Time To Do That. I Need to Run My Business."

To which I respond, "Ok. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

One guy said to me today, "Is that the end of your pitch?".

To which I responded, "Do you want me to blow smoke up your butt about how I can get your website out of invisible-land for $3500 and a wave of my magic wand?"

He laughed and said, "I appreciate the honesty. I guess I'll call you when I have more time to spend."

I said, "I'm here when this is important for you to do right."