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The subject line was just an unimpressed emoji face, which is not really what you’re looking for in email communications with clients.

“I’m not sure what to tell you, Sarah. I love your blog and what you do but it’s been two months since we worked together and, honestly, I haven’t seen much change in my blog traffic or social media following. I don’t think it worked.” 

Reader, I don’t mind telling you it was with a dry mouth and shaking hands that I clicked through to look at her website. Was I a fraud? Was I about to get my first request for a refund? WAS I A FAILURE AS A HUMAN???

Instead of discovering that I was an impostor who should never be hired by anyone again ever, I discovered that my client had ignored 85% of the suggestions I’d given her. 

Had she fixed any of those broken links? No.
Was she using headings to make her blog posts more readable? Nope.
Did she optimize her posts? She did not.

Unsurprisingly, my initial reaction was to draft a not-entirely-polite email to this client who’d spent a lot of money to ignore my advice.

But then I realized that I was just as much at fault for this as she was. I hadn’t told my client why she needed make these changes. It’s hard to get excited about embedding code, scheduling Facebook updates, or re-jiggering old blog posts if we don’t understand how + why it’ll benefit us.

You can't expect someone to do something if you don't tell them WHY they should do it. Share on X
Dur, right? But it’s so easy to forget!

And there are tons of (somewhat) valid reasons we forget the why.

Maybe we’ve been doing something for so long we can’t even remember the beginner’s mindset. We don’t remember what it’s like to struggle with SEO/white balance/classroom management. It’s been years since we learned about alt text, so we forget to even explain it.

Why we should explain why

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