Most business owners think they need a new website. Mickey Mellen has been building them for seventeen years, and a lot of his job is talking people out of it.

Bobby is joined by Mickey Mellen, co-founder of GreenMellen in Marietta, Georgia, for a practical conversation about marketing when you run a company and nobody on your team owns marketing. Mickey's argument is that almost everybody overthinks it. He gives five things to focus on, website, email, local, data and social, and says a little bit in each one beats a lot in one and nothing in the other four.

Along the way: why your website is now the last place a customer goes rather than the first, what your homepage should say instead of how many years you have been in business, and what he found when he ran fifteen thousand WordPress sites through a scanner he built.

The back half is about AI, from somebody who uses it daily and is not entirely happy about it. What it is doing to search, to attribution, to pricing, and to the number of people who will ever see anything you make.

And then the part Bobby keeps coming back to, which is numbers. Mickey on running his first five years off the bank balance, and the agency owner whose accountant called three days before Christmas to say there was not enough money for payroll.

"Google is the reward for doing all your other marketing right, in all the other places."

"If you are at all consistent with your stuff, you are the top five percent of businesses right there. The bar is so low."

Chapters:

0:00 Where people actually decide

0:37 Welcome

1:05 Meet Mickey Mellen and GreenMellen

2:47 Do not overthink it

3:28 The five things: website, email, local, data, social

5:31 "I need a new website." "No, you don't."

5:53 Lead with their problem, not your history

6:23 Your website is the last place they go

7:37 Perfect is the enemy of good

8:05 Trying to do too much

11:29 Why you should own your website

12:17 Fifteen thousand sites, four thousand broken

13:28 What is your marketing budget

14:46 Consistency, and the content calendar

16:50 What AI is doing to Google

17:28 Why a link costs you most of your reach

17:57 The CPA he hired ten years later

19:02 Lift versus attribution

19:55 Building your own tools with AI

21:30 What worries him about AI

22:08 A thousand pieces of content a day

23:28 I miss the handcrafted days

23:59 Confidentiality, risk and hallucinations

25:44 The Braves score the AI made up

26:44 Hire for fit over talent

27:13 What AI does to what you can charge

28:26 Cookies, a swing set, and fifty AI videos

29:35 Get your books in order

30:05 Forecasting instead of checking the bank

31:25 Three days before Christmas

32:32 Find somebody gifted differently than you

33:41 What makes a business partnership work

35:13 Trust

36:11 There is no such thing as a done website

37:09 Consistency puts you in the top five percent

37:47 The king of shiny objects

38:54 Kobe at five in the morning

39:47 The fundamentals of a top shelf organization

40:53 Look at your site through your customer's eyes

42:47 How AI search actually works

43:47 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.