Back in May, I spoke to the St. Louis Small Business Meetup Group about getting traffic, climbing the search engine rankings and beyond. It was a great meetup in a small restaurant in Kirkwood – a terrific atmosphere and I think you’ll enjoy this video. In it you’ll learn:
Will, we’ve heard what you say about blogging being a great way to increase your overall search presence, but we’re not sure where to start. Blogger, WordPress.com and others offer free blogging platforms – is that a good way to get started?
- Mike
This is a great question, Mike. I get this question in nearly every presentation I do.
In short, my answer is no, don’t use a free blogging service. The entire reason that I preach blogging as such a great tool for SEO is that it generates content for your website – for your domain. Ultimately you want to build your domain (website) up as the authority for your industry.
By using a free blogging service, you’re basically giving that content over to another company (another domain). By blogging with them, you are ultimately ranking their domain for your keyphrases. You are helping another business get traffic, not your own.
Don’t be confused, WordPress(.org) is a great blogging tool that you can download and install on your domain. That’s the way you should go.
Keep the great content, tips and how-to’s on your site. Grow it big and kick butt.
Will, I’m doing alright on clients right now, but by this summer I know it’s going to dry up a bit, so I’m thinking about doing PPC or a link building campaign. Which do you recommend?
- Jon
I’m not a huge fan of PPC. While I know it works, and works quite well for some businesses, it’s overall a very short-sighted strategy. If you have the budget, pay per click is an easy way to the front page for many terms. Problem is, most small business owners don’t have the budget they need in order to get or stay near the top. Plus, once that budget runs out, the ads immediately disappear and you are literally back to where you were when you wrote this email. Click to continue »
On most SEO-related blogs, you’re usually served with worn out, used up tips. By the time you hear about the things that really make a website pop, or some newfound traffic method, they’re out of date. This makes sense, I mean, when John Smith SEO finds out about some great traffic generator or tweak, he’d be hesitant to tell anyone as long as it worked. Once he saw a significant decrease in traffic from the technique, he’d gladly publish it to the masses and make himself sound like a great expert.
But today I’m going to tell you about a tip that you can take advantage of today, and it’ll help you today. But first, a little background in domain kiting. Click to continue »
There’s a growing movement out there based on flipping websites. It’s very similar to flipping a house, but with virtual real estate. The process is similar to a house, too – buy low, fix it up, sell for a profit. Flippa is doing a great job of catering to this group of ‘flippers’ and sometimes has some really great deals if you pay attention.
I’ve dabbled in the flipping world, but in a reverse kind of way – I’m flipping my own sites.
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I was in the room for all four of our kids births, so I can’t exactly relate to the all-too-often scene on TV where the Dad and family is sitting in the waiting room anxious to hear the news of their new son/daughter. Yet I feel the same way at times with some of my SEO accounts.
Waiting is part of the process. It’s a painful part for most clients, because while they’re waiting, they’re still writing checks to me for SEO work. Their level of trust with me is incredible, and I’m appreciative of it. I’ve done my part to sell my trust to them, and now they wait to see if I can deliver. Which I do.
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In 1923, Daniel Starch wrote a famous essay called The Principles of Advertising. “An advertisement,” he wrote, “to be successful (a) must be seen, (b) must be read, (c) must be believed, (d) must be remembered, and (e) must be acted upon.”
At the time, Starch was a visionary in the field of ads, and many of his essay points still ring true today, even in the digital world.
Your website is your advertisement to all passer-bys. Just like an ad in a local magazine or newspaper, if it sucks, it won’t be remembered, and it won’t be acted upon. Let’s dissect this a bit and see how you can improve your overall website ROI. Click to continue »
“Know your enemy” – Sun Tzu in The Art of War
If you use Twitter to promote your business (and you should), you are already ahead of most businesses in your industry. Twitter is a great tool, if you can leverage it correctly. Unfortunately, I see a lot of businesses using Twitter in ways that, while they think helps them, it’s actually hurting them.
If you’ve attended any of my seminars, you know that I’ve said blogging is by far one of the best ways to build your brand, promote your business, and increase your landing page count. Providing quality information that people are ready to consume will automatically put you in an authoritative position in their mind. You become the subject matter expert.
So when I see a business post a tweet that is informational about your industry, without a link back to your article, I hang my head in disgust. Here you have a great piece of information, like a celebrity that uses your product, but you don’t link it anywhere. You missed the target!
The real enemy here is simply missed traffic. Twitter gets insane amounts of traffic. Ultimately, traffic back to your website means branding, which leads to sales; and that’s what we’re after. Even if someone doesn’t need your product today, when they do need it, you want to have your logo/biz name pre-planted in their head.
It’s not enough to put posts on Twitter about interesting things. Take all those interesting things that you find out and write a blog post about them. Expand on them, add some great information about why this info is great, and provide it all in a way that is purely educational and not sales-y.
People aren’t stupid. If you’re talking about how blue widgets can kill mosquitos, and they happen to have a mosquito problem, they’re smart enough to click over to your blue widget page and buy.
As I hear all the time when my kids are playing Call of Duty 5, The Enemy has Taken Your Flag! Don’t let twitter take your flag (traffic) and keep it. You’re posting the information to help people, right? So make sure the traffic that your Twitter feed is seeing gets to your website. Don’t drop the ball.
Many business people understand that there’s an advantage to Twitter. They’ve got the understanding that most people are following you because they’re interested in what you have to say/sell. You’ve got your target audience in your hands, and they patiently await to be persuaded to buy.
So when you want to offer a deal to people because you’re nice, or because they are raving about your product, don’t post a message telling them that “for a good deal”, they need to contact you.
Why? Well, let’s go back to your audience. Many of these people are interested in what you have to say/sell, right? But they are probably passively interested. Meaning, they aren’t interested in putting a lot of time into you (along with the thousands of other businesses clammoring for their attention). So posting a message saying that in order to save they have to contact you, you may have just lost a sale.
Why not just post the coupon online for all to see? The more your of your audience that sees it, the more sales you’ll get, right?
While this one isn’t as big of a no-no as the others, it’s still one that makes me scratch my head when I see it.
You find a great article on something in your industry. It’s written by a well known competitor, and (unfortunatly) you agree with what they’ve posted. Or maybe you don’t. Either way, don’t go twitter-crazy and immediately post a link to the guy’s article, especially if you disagree.
If you agree with what was said, consider rewriting the article as your own content (careful here… you don’t want to be accused of plagiarizing or called a Johnny-come-lately) or post something on your site about how your business agrees with what was said on such and such’s site.
If you disagree, you’ve got all kinds of firepower to write up a great blog post. Inform your readers by (politely) showing how your competitor is wrong, and how your company would do the project right.
In Saint Louis MO? Learn more about Internet Marketing at the Look at Me Seminar in June.
