This idea is stupid. Let me see if it will work!
As far as I was ready for the challenge, on June 2015, I was not quite sure how to solve the problem. The site had a large search box on the home page, a couple hundred of categories and several thousands of products.
Problem: poor Google rankings for all those categories and products. Only the homepage was receiving inbound links and SEO values. The challenge was to modify the internal site architecture so that SEO values are transferred to the internal pages (mentioned categories and products). When crawling the website Google was literally was unable to find internal content.
The budget is there, the client is ready to pay big overhaul of the website, structural changes and redesign.
Long story short: one completely silly, easy to implement, cheap (and stupid) idea has brought great results - breadcrumbs!
BAM! Team had put breadcrumbs, and immediately crawl rate got better, internal linking has significantly improved, and finally, organic traffic began pouring in.
Keep on failing
Of course, it does not always work that way. For every successful idea, at least five or six of those end up as a total fiasco. But that does not stop me from experimenting and thinking of non-standard solutions.
It's not about lack of knowledge, inexperience, or insecurity. No.
Simply, each problem has its own specificities and needs, and you need to approach to it with fresh ideas. Design a custom solution. That is perfect for that problem.
Experience is important. But I'm looking at experience as a knowledge I've collected by solving problems in the past. Today experience helps me exclude some ideas, to eliminate things that I know will not work.
I do not like to hold on to experience. Experience is laziness. In this business I have to constantly learn and test new things or I am dead within a year.
To be understood, I am writing here about digital marketing. I do not know exactly whether this approach can apply to other industries.
Forget what other people think
I have the feeling that people do not suggest ideas because they are afraid of the opinions of others. As if they might sound stupid.
It's my luck that I had managers and bosses who had an understanding of the stupid ideas I suggested. They did not block me, but they just waited to see my results. Sometimes my ideas work, sometimes they not. It does not matter, I constantly learn.
Kobe Bryant, five-time NBA champion & player with the most missed shots in NBA history
Stagnation
Taking things for granted is not productive. Stagnation is a nasty player. I have experienced that in my life a million times, and especially in the business. Digital marketing is changing so fast that some of the rules that I conducted a year ago are now not at current at all.
Do you think success comes by following some old rules and solutions? Hardly.
I had the best CTR and conversion rates on completely silly ads, I got the links by sending emails to the webmasters entitled "I do not want a link from you unless ...", heck I got my first proper job back in 2011 by reacting to a tweet.
Ideas
Do you want better Google rankings, growth of your profit, better interaction on social media for your company page, or higher advertising revenue? You have a couple of ideas? Let me tell you straight away: All ideas are stupid and complete waste of time. Until one of them works. Then that idea is awesome. But you will never know which one is awesome, so right now start working on your stupid ideas.