It’s really hard when they’ve written the content themselves. It’s tough for them to hear the positive critique if it means letting go, sometimes. On the flip side, I can’t tell you how often I see emails, both to my own sites and to those I work on for clients, where people pitch to them telling them their content is “lame” or “sucks” or some other derogatory stuff. That’s not the way to convince someone to hire you, especially when said pitch is full of errors.

I remember one client asked directly for a critique of his website. After my point-by-point response, he said “Wow, be careful what you ask for.” Even though I was kind and positive in my response (including “Here’s another place you could improve your results” type of advice), he was a little wounded. He hired me and loved the result, but he must have had an emotional connection to the content. It’s never easy for anyone to hear “This isn’t quite right” when they think they’ve done a brilliant job.