The Online Fix

The Online Fix Stop guessing. Start growing. Marketing Optimisation & Growth. Report. Analyse. Act.
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The Online Fix provides digital marketing services for small business owners and soloprenuers. We provide strategy, troubleshooting and mentoring for the DIY Marketer and content marketing, including copy, ads and social programs across all digital platforms for those that want a helping hand to get their marketing right!

It’s August, it's time to talk about December. Because if you’re in a business where you count on the end of year sales ...
31/08/2026

It’s August, it's time to talk about December. Because if you’re in a business where you count on the end of year sales plus the gifting season moving into New Year, then now is the time to be talking about what you’re going to do.

Why? Because the shopping season starts in the run up to Black Friday, with many people having completed their Christmas gift giving shopping by the end of November - and continues with opportunities through to the new year.

So what does that mean? Well planning it out - what are the activities you’ll do to help warm up your audiences, checking your email list, the social media program. Do you need new creatives or photos done to help fuel the sale season? And how will you pace this through the coming months?

Other things to think about are Ads. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Google, Meta or TikTok, the ad algorithms rely on multiple great creatives and time to learn. That means making sure you’ve got all your creative lined up (not just ‘one’ and you're going to put some money behind) and you’re starting the campaign with enough time to learn and start producing results for you. What else? Are you going to have an offer - and do you need to do anything to prepare this? Do you want to do collaborations in some form with other accounts or businesses? All of these things take time.

Then there’s the mechanics of making the most of this period. Have you got all your tracking in place to optimise and adjust as you roll your campaigns out - and of course using this to understand what worked or didn’t so you can improve on this next year.

Too often I have conversations with business owners about optimisation for their end of year campaigns in November. Generally it’s too late by then to have much impact. This is where a campaign plan that spans the entire year earns its bickies. It’s a bit boring and definitely underrated but looking forward and knowing what’s coming up helps to ensure you execute well - and on time. So, is your Q4 plan written down yet, or still in your head?

I feel like the only people that can do well today are those that have the super power of ‘change’ and adapting, over an...
24/08/2026

I feel like the only people that can do well today are those that have the super power of ‘change’ and adapting, over and over again.
I’ve been prepping for a workshop on AI tools for marketing that I’m running this week for the lovely people at iHarvest Coworking in Brimbank.
I have to redo this content every time I run it. Because of course, the only constant with this AI guff is change. Every week there is something new and different. We are not yet at the end destination if there is ever one. There are no best tools ever. There is only what’s best for you right now. And this may change next week.
Anyhoo. If you are trying to keep up and want to work out how, as a small business, you can use AI for marketing, take a look, this Thursday 27, It will give you the know-how and skills to approach this ever changing space:)
https://f.mtr.cool/dvechhmnva
We’re working through how to put AI to work in your business. There are lots of practical workflows to string together useful output (and best value tool/s) - and how to level up as you start to explore its usefulness.

18/08/2026

Nobody tells you how thick your skin needs to be to run a small business.
You put something out. An ad, a post, an offer. Sometimes it lands. Often it doesn't.
The businesses that make it aren't the ones who never get it wrong. They're the ones who treat "wrong" as information, not failure. A flat ad isn't a verdict on you. It’s a data point. Adjust the hook. Change the offer. Try again.
I rarely see overnight success. What looks sudden from the outside is usually two, three, five years of quiet adjusting that nobody saw happen.
Persistence isn't stubbornness. It's staying in the game long enough to gather enough data points to find what actually works.
If you've been putting yourself out there and it's not landing yet, that's not proof it won't. That's just where you are in the process.

10/08/2026

I did a workshop last week for a local council with a really switched on business community. Out of about 60 people in the room, only a few raised their hands when I asked if they sent out ‘campaigns’ or had a calendar of campaigns for the year.
The workshop was talking about ‘maximising the money moments in your ‘year’ by proactively planning your campaigns. The key ideas were:
1. If you don’t make yourself visible then no one knows you’re there
2. There are points in the year/ or relationship with a customer when you’re offering is genuinely more relevant/ needed – so these are times to be making a noise!
3. If you don’t plan for this kind of activity, for most small businesses, it just won’t happen (witness the lack of hands in my workshop yesterday!)
Being organised, thinking about the ‘human’ and their needs and interests’ and aligning your visibility is a simple formula for approach your marketing. You don’t need to be Don Draper from Mad Men, you just need to show up at the right time with the right message – and work to improve as you go along. Job done!!

When your business runs on referrals, you never have to explain yourself to strangers.The referrer does it for you. They...
05/08/2026

When your business runs on referrals, you never have to explain yourself to strangers.
The referrer does it for you. They already know what you do, who you help, and why it works. They just make the introduction. You show up, have a conversation, and close the work.
It's a beautiful way to build a business. Until things go quiet.
I was working with someone recently who'd built a strong, respected practice over many years. Real clients. Significant contracts. A genuine specialist.
Her website said "safety consultant."
What she actually did was high-stakes incident investigation for complex, high-risk industries. The kind of work that gets called in when something has gone seriously wrong and an organisation needs someone who knows exactly what they're looking at.
Completely different thing.
When referrals slowed and she wanted to start marketing actively, she went to update her digital presence — and realised nothing she had online reflected what she actually did or who she actually served.
Here's what I see happen constantly with referral-built service businesses.
In the early years, you take what comes. You work out what you're good at through the clients you serve. The niche finds you — you don't find it. But because referrals handled all the explaining, you never had to articulate it yourself.
The moment you try to market to strangers, that gap becomes very visible very quickly.
The fix wasn't complicated. It was getting specific. About the problem she solved. The clients who needed it. The language they actually used when they were looking for help.
Specific positioning isn't just good marketing. It's the only kind that works when you're no longer relying on someone else to explain you.

29/07/2026

What should a good agency report actually look like?
I had a diagnostic session recently with a business owner running a wellness centre. Around $5,000 a month going out across Meta and Google. The question on the table: is this working?
Something had shifted. What had been delivering results the previous year had quietly stopped. The agency's position when asked was reassuring — the ads are doing well, trust the process. But the numbers weren't backing that up.
So we opened the report together.
Long document. Looked thorough. Charts, keyword tables, traffic breakdowns, audience demographics. Lots of pages.
We got to page five before we found anything that could tell us whether the marketing was actually working.
No trend lines. No month-on-month comparisons. No benchmarks. No record of what had been done that month or what was planned for next. Just numbers sitting there with no context.
A 6.4% conversion rate sounds either great or terrible depending on what you were getting before. This report didn't say.
The report wasn't designed to inform. It was designed to look like information.
Here's the thing though — and this is important. The outcome of that diagnostic session wasn't a clear verdict. It wasn't "your agency is doing a bad job." It wasn't even "this is broken."
It was a list of questions to take back to the agency. And a template for what to ask for in the report going forward.
Two pages would do it. What happened this month. Whether it's up or down on last month. What's being done next month and why.
That's not a big ask. It's just the minimum you need to have a real conversation about whether your $5,000 a month is working.

27/07/2026

Running event-based Meta ads to sell tickets used to be pretty straightforward. Not anymore.
The last major algorithm update changed the game. You will need the following:
- The creative. Fresh, varied, swapped before fatigue set in — not after.
- The budget. Enough from the start to give the algorithm real data to work with.
- The tracking. Set up properly so the algorithm knew what a conversion actually looked like.

That last one matters more than most people realise.

If the tracking isn't right, you can't tell the difference between a campaign that's working and one that's bleeding slowly. And neither can the algorithm.

20/07/2026

Audience isn't a marketing exercise. It's how you find the right words to sell your thing. Clarity on your audience flows into everything. Your landing page. Your ads. Your social content. The words that make the right person think you're reading their mind.

Often this is something that many small business owners lack clarity on.

If you need some help finding your audience, get in touch.

15/07/2026

Where do you even start working out what the problem is?
I had a client in this position. High value offer that went great guns last year. Same offer, same price, same campaign this year — it bombed.
So we looked at the data. This is what it showed.
Organic social traffic to the offer page: 955 visitors last year. 40 this year.
Email list growth over the same period: less than 3%.
That's not an offer problem.
That's a top of funnel, new eyeballs problem.
In the months between the first launch and the second, almost no new people had found and considered the offer. The original audience had already bought. There was no one left to sell to.
The bucket hadn't been refilled.
Solution: audience growth as an ongoing evergreen activity — not something you turn on when a launch is coming.

Facebook says 40 sales. Google says 35. Shopify shows 28.They're all wrong. They're all right. Here's why.Every platfor...
14/07/2026

Facebook says 40 sales. Google says 35. Shopify shows 28.
They're all wrong. They're all right. Here's why.
Every platform tracks differently.
Example Imagine this typical 3-day path to a purchase...
Monday: Customer clicks a Meta ad on their phone but doesn't buy.
Tuesday: Customer opens their laptop, searches your brand name, and clicks a Google Search ad.
Wednesday: They type your website directly into their browser and make a $100 purchase.
How Meta reports on the Ad: Meta claims $100 for Monday’s click with their 7 day attribution window
OR
within 1 day of a non-link click, or 1 day of viewing the ad
How Google reports on the Ad: Google claims $100 for Tuesday’s click but uses a Data-Driven Attribution where an algorithm decides how much credit to give to which ad, keyword or campaign ...
Both Google and Meta Only look inside their own platform.
Google’s and Meta ads are invisible to them.
BOTH claim the sale.
Meanwhile ... Your website reports on the Ad:
The Wednesday visit direct to your website is likely now showing as a ‘Direct’ channel visit for attribution of the $100 sale ..... not your ads ...
The fix is using GA4 as your independent source.
It sees across all channels and shows you last-click, first-click and data-driven attribution in one place.
No platform bias.
Just a clearer picture.

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