Anti-marketing
Here's a weird thing. After spending twenty years growing the brand name of my business, after growing beyond my capacity to function, I closed that business and changed the name and essentially abandoned the good will I'd created.
I get a phone call or email every single week from someone new seeking tax preparation services. I can barely manage the clients I already have and I turn them all away, then try to figure out where they found my name and try to stop it. In this case, Google is not my friend. I still get top billing as the top-ranked tax preparation firm under the old name, complete with old picture showing old phone number. (I still have that old phone number, but I know that 100% of the phone calls to it are spam. I use it as an outgoing line.) I just went to review that firm and put the lowest possible review on it with a blurb about how it closed and reopened with different services. I know whenever I read reviews of places I always read the low star ones first, don't you?
But how weird is that, that I'm actively trying to kill a brand that I spent twenty years building. It hurts a bit. I wonder if I should sell the name, but that doesn't feel right, either. I'll keep sitting on this.
Meanwhile, I own both domains (old name and new name) but the new name still redirects to the old name's domain for the actual hosted website. I can fix this, I just haven't gotten around to it. I don't actually know how, to tell the truth. I hired a guy originally to port me over to wordpress site and and I've just maintained it myself since then, but don't really know how he did it. Obviously I can figure it out, but, hello, too little time. Running two businesses AND spending every week driving to Maine to clean has me feeling time famine again.
I get a phone call or email every single week from someone new seeking tax preparation services. I can barely manage the clients I already have and I turn them all away, then try to figure out where they found my name and try to stop it. In this case, Google is not my friend. I still get top billing as the top-ranked tax preparation firm under the old name, complete with old picture showing old phone number. (I still have that old phone number, but I know that 100% of the phone calls to it are spam. I use it as an outgoing line.) I just went to review that firm and put the lowest possible review on it with a blurb about how it closed and reopened with different services. I know whenever I read reviews of places I always read the low star ones first, don't you?
But how weird is that, that I'm actively trying to kill a brand that I spent twenty years building. It hurts a bit. I wonder if I should sell the name, but that doesn't feel right, either. I'll keep sitting on this.
Meanwhile, I own both domains (old name and new name) but the new name still redirects to the old name's domain for the actual hosted website. I can fix this, I just haven't gotten around to it. I don't actually know how, to tell the truth. I hired a guy originally to port me over to wordpress site and and I've just maintained it myself since then, but don't really know how he did it. Obviously I can figure it out, but, hello, too little time. Running two businesses AND spending every week driving to Maine to clean has me feeling time famine again.